Naware’s weedless technology could change the way we deal with weed

Naware founder Mark Boysen first tried to kill weeds with drones and a 200-watt laser.

He’s thinking about starting with some friends, and thinking about how his family in North Dakota lost three members to cancer, which he suspects may be related to chemicals in the groundwater. Finding a chemical-free way to kill weeds seemed like a difficult process.

But the laser had a problem. There is a huge risk of starting a fire, he told TechCrunch in an interview. After much trial-and-error with ideas like cryogenics. The answer settled on – what he he showed earlier this year TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 – and steam.

Boysen’s company has developed a system that uses computer vision to spot weeds in lawns and gardens and golf courses, and kill them with nothing but dry water. It can be attached to mowers, tractors, and even ATVs. Meanwhile, Naware is a reformer, and Boysen seems eager for his idea to spread quickly – like a weed he wants to kill.

In the world of AI and multi-billion dollar software companies, Naware is known as a garage start-up story. Boysen said his team first tried using steam by ordering a “rinky dink” garment from Amazon. After that, he called 7 others.

“They’re not real factories,” Boysen said he quickly realized. “So there’s a lot of research to help make that happen, to the point of: ‘How do we make this work and replicate it?'”

Developing the steamer technology was one challenge, but the biggest one may have been identifying weeds, Boysen said. It has been well established that artificial intelligence programs can be trained to accurately identify objects or patterns, but the “green-on-green” problem was difficult, he said – especially because the program must identify weeds in real time while the controller is moving on the lawn. (And yes, it uses Nvidia GPUs.)

He thinks they’ll get there, though. He said Naware is looking at companies that maintain lawns on athletic fields and golf courses, and says his company can save such clients “anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 in treatments alone.”

On top of that, he said customers will save money by not paying people whose job it is to spray the drug. Naware has been producing paid pilots for auditions and auditions, but Boysen’s style has already attracted prospective participants, he said.

“We are pursuing this agreement. We are negotiating with companies worth 5 billion dollars that produce equipment that is very interested in our products. And we are in several negotiations – I will not mention their names, but you will find out,” he laughed.

Success, Boysen said, will take three things: relationships, obtaining patents, and money. Boysen has been launching Naware for now, but said he will launch his first round of fundraising in the coming months.

“I’ve got to get the money around that just crushes everybody else who’s trying to figure it out,” he said. “I have to make a promise that I can kill weeds, and it’s effective, and we’re going to help. I’m not concerned about that.”