Hire Henry won the final round of the AlphaLab Gear Hardware Cup pitch competition in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence vertical. The St. Louis startup took home $50,000 in non-diluted cash that the CEO says will go toward improving the company’s fully-functional prototype and get it in the hands of more Beta customers without having to raise an institutional round.
“Hardware is hard. It’s expensive. It takes time,” George Holmes Ph.D. told the 4thEst8. “To be able to iterate on our product, and take our customer feedback and make the product better, and continue to test – is what this prize money is going to allow us to do.”
The autonomous commercial mower platform they’re developing is light enough that contractors won’t need a trailer to haul it around, and Hire Henry expects to lease it’s machines to make commercial lawn mowing accessible to a broader range of customers. The mower has sensors and AI that integrates with a mapping app to navigate the area to be mowed. Holmes founded Hire Henry in 2015 and was joined in 2018 by COO Keiry “Katie” Moreno-Bonnett. Hire Henry came out of the University of Missouri, St. Louis ‘Accelerate D.E.I’ accelerator in the spring of 2021.
“This is the dream in terms of demonstrating that early stage capital infusion to minority founders is good economic development,” UMSL Accelerate founding executive director Dan Lauer said, upon learning of Hire Henry’s win. “We couldn’t be happier. We are looking forward to their next milestone.”
Beta Customers
This coming Monday Holmes tells the 4thEst8 he’s putting the latest prototype in front of a test customer. He says the key to development is keeping the mower lightweight, sleek and portable.
“If we made the cutting system too big then we would have to make our motors bigger and our frame bigger,” Holmes said. “Within the last two weeks we’ve really finalized on one important design piece that we’ve been working on and this upcoming Monday we’re going to show it off to a customer, demonstrate the technology, get their feedback, and continue to iterate.”
The Clean Tech, Consumer Products, Smart Homes, and Smart Cities competition by AlphaLab was hosted by Venture Cafe, Rotterdam. Hire Henry took the prize in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence vertical.
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