AI-Powered Tractor Startup Burns Through a Quarter Billion Dollars, Fires All Employees in Epic Implosion

Monarch Tractor

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The world simply wasn’t ready for AI powered tractors.

Or perhaps it was Monarch Tractor, the much-hyped company that promised to revolutionize agriculture when it launched these electric-powered autonomous farm machines in 2023, that wasn’t prepared to deploy its own creation.

Once valued at over half a billion dollars and buoyed by over $240 million in initial funding, Monarch is now in ruins. After burning through that mountain of cash, it laid off its entire workforce late last year, warning that it may “shut down” entirely. In March, it was reported that it vacated its Livermore, California headquarters, almost certainly spelling the end.

What went wrong? There are myriad reasons at play, but chief among them is that it sounds like the AI tractors kind of sucked compared to the venture’s vast hype — a warning to AI and robotics startups everywhere that eventually reality can come crashing down like a bad harvest.

New reporting from SFGATE about the company’s undoing points to a brutal review from California winemaker Patrick O’Connor, who says he’s been testing the tractor for three years on his vineyard.

“It totally failed,” he said in a recent Instagram video that garnered over 25,000 likes.

More worryingly, “it was actually quite dangerous,” he added. In his view, a quarter of a billion dollars had been “wasted” on developing the “failed autonomous AI robot tractor.”

In an interview with SFGATE, O’Connor drove the point home by saying he couldn’t find a single serious use for the AI tractor, and found its self-driving mode to be hazardous. “I wouldn’t let anyone else around it,” he said.

Don’t just take O’Connor’s word for it. Last September, several tractor dealerships sued Monarch for allegedly selling defective tractors and making misleading claims about their autonomy. Monarch denied the claims, but in a detail that further underscores the tumult at the company, the attorneys on at least one of the suits have stopped representing the tractor maker, SFGATE noted, citing reporting from Pleasanton Weekly.

Monarch made a heavy push to have its tractors catch on at dairy farms and vineyards. O’Connor was an early adopter, hoping that they could perform physically gruelling work like spraying pesticides on his steep plantation, adding that the machines were designed to work in the narrow lanes of vineyards.

“It was theoretically promising advancement in mechanical weed control over chemical weed control,” O’Connor told SFGATE. “But the hydraulics were finicky, the automated row follow didn’t pan out. It was hitting my vines. And it was never to a point where you could be driverless.”

Now it’s mostly a glorified mule for O’Connor, who uses it to haul around tools in its storage container and hooks power tools up to its beefy battery.

Using a custom attachment, he also uses it to split wood.

“$200 million log splitter,” O’Connor dryly enthused in the Instagram video.

More on self-driving AI: Tesla Workers Are Seizing Control of Robotaxis When They Get Stuck