Scythe Robotics alumni launch Agency Tool Co for robot OTA software deploy

Jack Morrison and Davis Foster, co-founders of Scythe Robotics, launched Agency Tool Co., a startup building infrastructure for robotics developers, The Robot Report reported. Its first product, ATC Deploy, ships software updates to robots in the field while working with customers' existing operating system images, Docker OCI images, and file trees. Morrison told the outlet that after leaving Scythe about a year ago, he and Foster saw robotics companies hitting the same deployment bottlenecks Scythe faced. He said over-the-air updates remain hard at fleet scale because teams juggle scripts for copy, version switching, restarts, and transfer validation, problems that worsen across tens to thousands of machines and flaky LTE, 3G, sonar, or satellite links. Launch partners are Burro, which has more than 750 outdoor and agricultural robots in the field; Gather AI, which operates warehouse inventory drones; and Tempo, which is beginning to deploy grinding machines at customer sites. Morrison said the partners sit at different stages from lab work to scaled fleets but share needs around bandwidth and architecture-preserving updates. Agency Tool Co. plans ATC Build next, aimed at validation and continuous integration with cloud-side access to embedded boards the company would host. Morrison said the firm is taking early customers for ATC Deploy, with a fuller rollout expected in the next few months.