YouSaid · the spoken record

Praveen Penmetsa

lines on the record: 35
first: 2023-09-30
most recent: 2023-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And the chemicals are expensive. So the best example for us was from a data standpoint, they are now able to see where they want to spray. They spray only in those places if there's a problem. In every other place, they use our mowing machine, the under the wine weeder, to basically cut the grass instead of spaying expensive, dangerous chemicals. Huge savings for them on the money side. They're able to use the data to figure out where and how to spray. They're able to use the data to run their operations for more efficiency. And this is happening in month three of our deployment. And that's the power of AI and vision coming off of the cameras of the tractor.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using AI, using vision cameras say that your operation can be more energy efficient for the first time if you do the small adjustments and for the first time your operator now gets feedback. Historically, nobody would have noticed it. Maybe at the end of the month they would be like, why is that diesel be a little bit higher? That's a big change. The second big thing is we gave our tractor to our farmers and we said, hey, what do you want to use it for? You should probably mow with this. And they were like, no, I'm going to attach this weeding machine that's going to cut grass between these vineyards. We are like, why? And they were like, well, we always wanted to use this machine, but we could not afford the labor cost of running this five times in a season. So we just prechemicals right now. Once we spray it, it's done for the season.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the challenge on the battery side. On the safety side, we're able to leverage a lot of the good work that's happening on automotive and energy storage. So we try to productionize that instead of starting new chemistry work. So that's that side of it. You brought up a great question. I'll give you two small short snippets of how data's been amazing. We noticed that whenever we deployed our tractors to farmers, they started using it for all these mowing stuff. And we noticed that one of the farmers was getting like nine plus hours and the other farmer was getting like four or five hours. Historically, they would not have noticed it. It would have shown up as diesel consumption. Nobody cares about diesel consumption on a tractor, right? But what we noticed was like, hey, why is there an energy delta? Our cameras that recognize the mower said that, hey, we can see it, the mower settings are off. Yes, they're still mowing, but they're using a lot more energy for a simple operation. So we were able to”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks a lot. So, the first one I'll make it short is the battery side of it. There's a lot of work going on on batteries, but our whole goal is how do we give maximum energy to our farmers with maximum life cycle, which is what you talked about, is how long will this battery last. And for us, we don't need any advanced chemistries there, the existing chemistries, it's a matter of getting the cost down to where the farmers can afford it and enough energy. Our tractor has more than 100 kilowatt hours of battery on it, and we sell that whole thing for less than $90,000 today. It's pretty crazy. I think we can do more because we want to sell our tractor for $10,000 to $15,000 in India.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's two things there, right? Just to unpack that a little bit. The reason there's a right to repair issues today, and I have a lot of sympathy for all the diesel companies that build tractors, is that's all emissions regulations driven. You cannot let somebody monkey with your emissions equipment that is not certified to do so. So the tractor companies are struggling with that part. But the key here is once we transition to electric smart devices where the data can be open and it's not emissions driven or compliance driven, the data pipe should be open. So that's the dichotomy is to you're asking me to answer questions on will the government allow farmers to monkey with emissions equipment on a farm? They won't. Not going to happen. But if you go to electric zero emissions and it's not emissions related anymore, farmers should have every right to modify their tractor, come up with their own attachments, train it and use it.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we actually have two tractors that have hit the ground in Europe this week. The first one is being piloted in Italy by the end of next week. So we also have a tractor in New Zealand now. And just the great thing about tractors is you can go anywhere unlike a car, right? There's no regulations and compliance If you guys are trying to get your device into market and you want to skirt regulations and compliance, call it a tractor.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that has been the key to the transition. The reason other people don't do it is that's crazy hard because we have now had to make sure that our hydraulics, our gearboxes, all the implement attachments, everything can be biwire controlled and can be controlled from the cloud. And we get full data on each one of those things. That's the deep technology part of this simple looking tractor”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question, and that comes to our big differentiator as monarch tractor compared to our competitors, is you made a great point, which is we cannot change farm operations. People don't understand that farmers get 40 iterations, 40 tries in their lifetime at farming. That's 40 seasons, right? If you ask them to say, hey, can you try something new? That's one down, right? So what we have done with our tractor that is very different to everybody else is we tell our farmers you can use the same implements that you have on your farm today. You can farm the same way. All I'm asking you to do is to swap out your tractor for hours. That's it. There's no operational change. Same implement, same attachments, everything else remains the same, same driver.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our goal from day one has always been that this is the device. Every device on our farm needs to be zero emissions, needs to be some form of automation with the lack of labor that we have in farms, and needs to be smart. So you and I know how our food was grown. And also we can allow farmers to make more money. With that goal in mind, we built a tractor that will scale to every farmer. Our goal was a farmer in Africa or South Asia can eventually afford one. So I'm super excited to announce that we have just signed a partnership deal with the largest clean energy infrastructure company in India who is going to deploy our tractors in India at scale as a service so that small farmers who have two, three acres can just rent a tractor when needed from the infrastructure deployment and then use it and return it.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies love in rural areas. They might not like it if you do it in downtown San Francisco. But in rural areas where there's limited supply, they're like that. So this triple play is a great product view for us to allow farmers to get more utilization and more revenue streams from a tractor. So that's how we are addressing the limitations of infrastructure. We also have a swap cart that has its own charger. So you can actually take it in the middle of the field, swap the battery on our tractor, and keep going 24-7.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's one of the big challenges that is actually preventing the energy transition of farming, electric infrastructure like you're pointing out. What the tractor is doing is for the first time, if a farmer buys 10 of our tractors, that's a megawatt hour of energy. If they deploy solar on the farm, which we are now enabling them to do as a package, they get even better payback both on the solar side as well as on the tractor side. The reason for that is our tractor actually does triple duty. It's a tractor. It acts as a mobile gen set. So for the first time, the farmer can take a tractor to the middle of the field, plug stuff in, and power stuff off of their tractor, just like what the Ford Lightning does, etc. More importantly, while it's standing at your barn connected to your solar, it acts as energy storage, making you money as a farmer. So in California, there's a program where farmers can make money by putting this energy back into the grid. And also by demand response programs, UTLUD”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That holds the whole roof down. The two cables are data and power. So that whole roof can be upgraded two, three years from now with a new sensor suite, new computer, new connectivity. All of that is in the roof. So what that means is farmers can hang on to the platform, upgrade the roof if they want to, upgrade the battery if they want to, and get even better.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks to all the emissions equipment. The second thing is essentially they are looking for a payback here. So the value proposition comes from the tractor maintenance cost overwhelming you. That's why they swap tractors. With our tractor, our battery comes with an ATO warranty. We understress the battery right now. This is an energy plane, not a power play. Number one. Number two, there's no DC fast charging on farms because the electric infrastructure doesn't exist. So we take advantage of that on the product side to increase the longevity of the pack. But also more importantly, we have built this to be sustainable. If you look at our tractor, when you go out and check it out, you'll see that the battery is swappable, which means tomorrow when there's new chemistries, we'll just swap the battery out. You don't need to sell your whole tractor and buy a new one. Number one. Number two, the roof system, which is completely self-independent. If some of you walk out there, do pay attention, there's only two cables and bolt.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's a great question. Tractors are very often used for long periods of time for two reasons. Number one, there's no new value that you get by getting a new tractor. It doesn't give you something that the old tractor does, especially in the small tractors, right? So people tend to hang on because the new machines are actually less reliable.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I say supervisor, we have elevated the existing tractor driver. One thing that I was blown away by 10 years ago was just by looking at how Uber scaled in countries like India. I went there and this person who came in from the village who didn't speak the language, the same language I did, was able to drive a car, take me to my destination. The whole transaction happened, right? And he was able to make money. If they can do that, can we elevate an existing tractor driver to be a supervisor of a fleet of 68 tractors with the right technology abstraction? Yes, we can. And that's what we're doing.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's where the safety regimens kick in, right? Yes, everything is still geofenced. We have a whole deployment team that helps them on day one. This is very much like deploying enterprise software, right? Where we kind of walk in there and we say, we'll train your whole team. Let's set it up. We'll help you just take an outside geofenced map of your block. We'll tell you what the first row looks like, last row, middle row looks like. Check your connectivity. And then you can start to use operations. If in doubt, the whole thing comes to a stop. It's supervised autonomy. It's not teleop. It supervised autonomy. So the supervisor can jump in and keep track of like six to eight tractors at a time and say, oh, that thing is asking me for some intervention. Is this yours?”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right now I'm amused to see some of the numbers from the automotive OEMs, but we actually have 30% attach rate on our autonomy. I'll tell you what that means. That means three out of 10 of our customers are paying an annual subscription for autonomy today worth $8 plus $1,000. They're paying us $8 plus per device today, three out of ten farmers are.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Farming is a very low margin business, which means we have to provide value for the farmer as a product from our one. If you tell farmers the payback is four years, you and I might be amazed by it, they'll walk away. So payback for farmers has to be in months for them to actually buy this. So we had to make sure that the tractor saved money on diesel. Autonomy was a big unlock. Tractor drive was a very skilled operator. If they get a job wrong, it shows up in the yield six months later. So those are the kind of challenges that we're solving today. And those are all product challenges that we ran into.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The amount of movement also that we see, whether it's in terms of climbing hills or our roof system with our GPS, moves around two and a half feet sometimes. So how do you get a couple of inches of accuracy when the tractor platform is itself moving feet? So there's a number of technical challenges. Number one. Number two is on the safety side, we are able to leverage all the work that's been done, both on the EV platform as well as on the autonomous platforms. So we get to stand on the shoulders of all the people that have done this work in urban mobility, but take it in a different way. And the challenges we face in ag other than the robustness side is margins.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so a couple of things there. Number one, AG is very challenging in terms of robustness and durability, like the shock loads that attractor sees on a day-to-day basis would set off the alarms on your car, set off the airbags, and would turn off your battery system right away for safety. We see that on a day-to-day basis.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in her seeing Wisconsin driving past the case factory every single day in my life. You can see why I'm obsessed with tractors. Let's talk about the actual physical challenges of an autonomous EV tractor. whether it's yours or someone using your platform. It's all the same problems as cars, right? Yesterday, Rivian CO was here, somebody asked him about, what happens to this thing lights on fire? That's hard on a road. What happens if it happens in a field? How are you protecting the batteries? How are you sourcing the batteries? How's that going to”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, right now we make money in three ways we sell tractors, yes, we make money on the device side. We also sell subscriptions to our Connect and Automate platforms, which is the digital subscriptions that farmers pay us for. But the third revenue stream is our licensing revenue stream. Case New Holland is our first one. They've already announced two tractors powered by Monarch Technology. And now they're using our verbiage, which is open ecosystem to differentiate and bring a new play to the ag market compared to what John Deere is doing. So long story short, three revenue streams, hardware, digital subscriptions, and OE licensing, and we have unlocked all three already. So this is not hopes and a dreams. We have recognized revenue sitting on our financial statements for all three, right? So the market is ready.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this whole market is going to blow up, and our whole idea is to allow this to happen by giving them the technology that allows them to build smart electric autonomous machines for farming.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is going to be a huge market. Today, we only have 3 million tractors sold every year. And we have like two billion plus acres of cropland. I'm not talking about grazing land and stuff, cropland. Comparison 70 plus million cars are sold every year, right? So it tells you the disparity and also the opportunity for agriculture smart machines. So long story short, in the next 10 years, we'll need a lot more of these machines if you're going to stop using chemicals and do more operations on the farm. So this 3 million is going to grow. It's already been growing for the last five, six years. This market is going to blow up. There will be new entrants into this market. We are seeing that. We are seeing people from the food ecosystem come in, not just the equipment ecosystem. We are seeing input companies like fertilizer companies are now building devices.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about that approach, the android of agriculture, Spidline, just to extend the analogy, at the high end, the iPhone does not seem all that threatened by Android, right? Are you making an open always wins kind of play here, or are you saying there's going to be a huge market, and we're going to coexist with a more closed market?”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today we live in a world where you and I know more about the DoorDash person that delivered our food than the person who actually grew our food. And that's what has created this vicious cycle for us in our food ecosystem.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are completely different from that world, right? That was the whole reason why I started Monarch Tractor was to change that. Right now, farmers can't even repair their data or do diagnostics on their tractors without approval from the OE What we are doing at Monarch is we are licensing our technology out to all the tractor companies. One of our big partners, Case New Holland, is the world's second largest tractor company after John Deere. We have given our technology to them. So they sit on our data stack. So we are basically becoming the Android of agriculture. And the whole ecosystem can access our data lake through our APIs and provide reports. And we are very happy to share everything that comes off of our tractor with everybody in the food ecosystem, not just the farmer. Could be you and me.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The great part is because the tractor sits at the center of every farm, we get to see every operation from day one when the farming activities start all the way till post harvest when things stop. So we get data not only on what's happening out in the farm with our cameras, but the who, what, where, when, and how, most importantly, the how. How are they farming? All of this comes in from our vision systems, 3D cameras as well as standard cameras. And then we use AI and a lot of data scientists to kind of put this data into some structured data lakes that we can yank insights and reports out for the whole ecosystem.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers last month we delivered plus tractors to customers, trained them, and walked away. And walked away. So they're using electric autonomous machines now.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the fact that we're out at commercial scale, that the fact that we have Foxconn, the maker of our electronics devices building the smart electric machine for farming for tomorrow today out of Ohio is a big deal. So we have more than 200 of these machines out on farms doing activities, which gives us”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we launched our tractor commercially Dece Now we are the only electric autonomous vehicle that one of you can go out and buy. I'm very proud of that fact, right?”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I look at this tractor, I say, okay, salt to a lot of people, still got a steering wheel, it's got a battery in it, but the thing is festooned in sensors. Go look outside. It's covered in cameras and sensors. It has machine learning embedded in it. You are headed towards autonomy. You have a software platform that can control multiple tractors at once. There's a long way between fruit and vegetable farmers and someone has 1980s things autonomously driving over a connectivity platform. How are you doing right now? It's been just a little over a year. Where are we on the journey?”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So our mission at Monarch Tractor is about how do we make farming sustainable and farmers profitable. It might come as a surprise to most of us that less than half the farmers in the country actually make any money, less than 42%. And most of our farming is not farmed sustainably in terms of not just chemicals, but also in terms of how we use our resources, everything from water to fertilizers. The way we decide to go about it was to build a small tractor targeting the fruits and vegetables farmers. That's where most of our food comes from. And it's electric, it's autonomous, and it's smart. And what this allows the farmers to do for the first time ever is to have a tractor that generates new revenue streams for them using all the data that it collects while doing operations on the farm. So it's a familiar farm factor.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll hear Praveen say the average farmer only gets forty shots at iterating their process forty seasons of growing. And Praveen sees lots of opportunities for farms to make the transition to electric autonomous equipment without disrupting those forty cycles of agriculture. And of course there's a lot of opportunity for his business to benefit from that transition. Monarch has three ways of making money, he told us. There's the tractor hardware, of course, selling natural vehicles, there are subscription fees, monarch charges a recurring fee for its software platforms, which is smart tractors as a service, which is pretty good. And then there's licensing. Monarch has a deal with KIH, a gigantic tractor company, to use its platforms. The goal is to compete in an open way with closed platforms like John Deere. Praveen described his goal for the monarch platform to be the android of agriculture. It's pretty good. Okay, here's Praveen Penet.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Lifatelle, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other province. I co-hosted the Code Conference this week where I had the opportunity to hang out on stage with monarch tractor CEO Ravine Panmetza. And honestly, this was one of my favorite conversations of the entire event. We spent a lot of time here in Dakota talking about electric vehicles and the future of cars, and we're usually talking about passenger vehicles or maybe cargo vans. But there's another huge industry that can also reap the benefits of electrified transportation. That's agriculture. We are utterly reliant on farming as a species, and farming is utterly reliant on tractors. If we don't have tractors, we don't have food. And Praveen explained how he and monarch are trying to tackle that challenge. Praveen and I managed to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time on stage. Farming is a very old business, and it's hard to make big changes.”
2023-09-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · 'The Android of agriculture': Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa on the future of farming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT