Naware founder Mark Boysen first attempted killing weeds with drones and a 200-watt laser.
He’d been noodling on ideas for a startup with some friconcludes, and believeing about how his family in North Dakota had lost three members to cancer, something they suspected may be related to chemicals in the groundwater. Finding a chemical-free way to kill weeds seemed like a solid option.
But the laser was a dead conclude. There’s too much risk of starting a fire, he notified TechCrunch in an interview. After a lot of trial-and-error prototyping with ideas like cryogenics. The solution he settled on — which he revealed off earlier this year at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — is steam.
Boysen’s company has developed a system that utilizes computer vision to spot weeds in lawns and fields and golf courses, and kill them with nothing but vaporized water. It can be attached to mowers, or tractors, or even ATVs. At the moment, Naware is flexible, and Boysen is visibly eager for his idea to spread rapid — much like the weeds he’s attempting to kill.
In a world of agentic AI and billion-dollar software companies, Naware stands out as a classic garage startup story. Boysen declared his team first tested the utilize of steam by ordering a “rinky dink” garment steamer off of Amazon. After that, they ordered seven more.
“They’re not real industrial,” Boysen declared he quickly realized. “And so there’s a lot of research assisting to develop that, to obtain to the point of: ‘how do we build this effective and build it repeatable so it can scale?’”
Developing the steamer tech was one challenge, but the largeger one may have been identifying the weeds, Boysen declared. It’s well-established that artificial ininformigence software can be trained to accurately recognize objects or patterns, but the “green-on-green” problem was tough, he declared — especially becautilize the software has to recognize the weeds in real-time while the rig is prowling over a lawn. (And yes, it’s applying Nvidia GPUs.)
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He believes they’ve receivedten there, though. He declared Naware is tarobtaining companies that do lawn care for athletic fields and golf courses, and claims his company can save customers like that “anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 on chemicals alone.”
On top of that, he declared customers will save money by not having to pay for people whose only job is to spray those chemicals. Naware has been doing paid pilots to test and dial in the product, but Boysen’s pitch has already attracted prospective partners, he declared.
“We’re going after the strategic partnerships. We’re in discussions with $5 billion companies that do equipment manufacturing that are interested in our product. And we’re a couple conversations into that — I can’t state their name, but you’ll figure it out,” he laughed.
Success, Boysen declared, will take three things: those partnerships, securing patents, and funding. Boysen has been bootstrapping Naware for now, but declared he’ll open its first fundraising round in the coming months.
“I’ve received to obtain a funding round that just crushes anybody else attempting to believe about it” he declared. “I’ve received to deliver the promise that I can kill weeds, and it’s effective. And we’ll build it work. I’m not concerned about that.”
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