Caroline Petrow-Cohen put a great piece out in the LA Times on Monarch Tractor and it tells the whole tale of how a company and a sector can get over-hyped and lead to bad results for all concerned. I had a chance to talk to Caroline last week, and she was focused on the right stuff: what happened with Monarch, why were they so hyped up initially, and what went wrong? She was really asking if this was a one-off situation or something more systemic.
The answer is, naturally, a bit nuanced. There are some systemic challenges around AgTech – lack of IPOs and M&A following a 70% drop over four years suggests that all is not well in AgTech land, and that’s a fair conclusion. That is macro and a risk well beyond Monarch’s challenges. However, the case of Monarch Tractor is also a tale of a company that got way over their skis in terms of over-promising, under-delivering, and failing to solve meaningful problems for growers.
If you look at the lead in to the article, you see a $500 million valuation for electric, autonomous tractors that would save farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition to the crazy high valuation relative to actual results delivered in the market, Monarch made Time magazine’s list of the year’s best inventions (which is funny because most of the robots that were solving actual problems don’t get invited to compete for those lists. Hmm, maybe the siren call of an electric tractor did the trick?) and Monarch was on a Forbes list of startups most likely to reach a $1 billion valuation. Whatever you thought of the EV tractors Monarch was building, it was hard to look at the Forbes list and shake your head.
The valuation is the first problem – how did the investors justify those checks? Obviously, they never got around to ground truthing the story with growers while doing due diligence. Diligence is not for the faint of heart in AgTech and requires doing your homework at a pretty detailed level. In many technology startups, it’s called a pivot when you have to switch your value proposition to the customer in a meaningful way at some point during the product development/R&D process. Pivots can unlock a lot of value if done correctly, but they come with risk – added cost and added time to get to first product when you make the change in direction and have to throw out some work and start again on something different.
Pivots are a lot harder in AgTech because of the cost and time required, particularly with automation where hardware and physical things are involved and indeed are often a key part of the value proposition in the first place. You want to pivot to a new marketing strategy in mobile apps? No problem. Build a different campaign with new creatives and targeting and Shazam! the new campaign can land days later. Want to make a change to the robot you’re prototyping? Well, that’s going to take more than a few days in almost every case.
Two years after the large valuation off the back of a successful fund raise, Monarch was shut down after several layoffs, lawsuits, and factory closures. The assets of Monarch ended up being acquired by Caterpillar (yes, the construction company) in April 2026. So how did Monarch get so hyped up only to crash and burn two years later?
Let’s dive in.
Well, look at the article to get your first set of clues. First of all, it was a $100,000 robot tractor with technology that did not work as advertised and reportedly was crashing into objects in autonomous mode. I can’t confirm it from in-person viewing, but the stories are out there and folks can do their own due diligence. At the very least, if they worked and how well they worked are absolutely up for discussion depending on who you choose to believe. The first time a grower hears from another grower that a $100,000 tractor in test mode didn’t work, they’re taking it off their list of “things to evaluate.” The second time they hear it they’re probably paying it forward and telling a few friends hoping to get paid back by a similar warning down the road. Such is the life of the early adopters and testers in AgTech.
Second, it was a driver optional, battery powered tractor. Well, that’s two different value propositions and only the driverless part matters to most growers since tractor driver shortages nationwide are real and tractor drivers make a decent wage and they’re rolling around in some expensive equipment growers would rather not have bumping into things. And naturally, if driverless is the value proposition then it has to work flawlessly in autonomy because that’s the main reason for the purchase or the trial.
Third, Monarch was going to make it easier and cheaper to handle pests, irrigation, and harvesting. Folks, go back and reread that last part. One tractor (and/or one implement or it would most likely take multiple implements) is going to solve all three of those problems – pest management, water efficiency and tracking, and harvesting of fruit (in this case grapes off vines). Those are three entirely different use cases, and the idea that any one startup should take on all three while solving for electric usage and autonomous driving is just an absolute fool’s errand. You’re biting off more than a large animal could chew. Now it is possible that they had to sell that large of a vision to get a total addressable market (TAM) that was attractive enough to investors to secure a check. But whatever the reason, this is just the kitchen sink approach to a product roadmap, and those rarely work and almost never in AgTech.
Monarch needed to pick one thing and do it better than everybody else (pest management, water management, or harvesting) and just laser in on that solution to the exclusion of everything else. There is precedent for an electric tractor company doing this and it is of course our friends at Burro. Charlie Anderson and team took a small tractor platform format and optimized it for one task and one crop – harvest assist (moving the product from the harvest crew back to the truck – which created 15-30% efficiency gains for the harvest crew which means they get done faster and paid more – clearly a win on all sides). When Burro messaged the product, they focused on grower value statements – “save time by using the Burro to help your crew work faster” as a rough example. But Praveen and Monarch never locked and loaded on a single value proposition, and in the end, that contributed to the market disconnect between a $500 million valuation and a startup that wasn’t quite ever able to solve a real grower problem. Full credit to Burro for figuring out a go-to market approach for an electric tractor that worked and just delivering the grower facing message around efficiency. The electric part wasn’t even baked in. It didn’t need to be. Burro did the job whatever its fuel for mobility turned out to be. Praveen and team could have learned a lot from watching Burro, who was already in market.
Fourth, let’s look at the messaging from CEO Praveen Penmetsa to Forbes in 2023 (when they got picked for the list mentioned above). “We are the only all-electric, driver-optional tractor in the world that farmers can buy today.” Umm, hmm, yeah, so wake me up when a grower gets up out of bed in a cold sweat and says to somebody, anybody, “Geez, if I only had an all-electric, driver-optional tractor that I could buy today my life would be so much better.” That’s not happening. Now if Praveen wanted to say “if you are having a shortage of qualified drivers problem, our tractor can help with autonomous driving capabilities that can save you $x by avoiding accidents and driving autonomously in your vineyard to complete tasks you need help completing” that might work, but the tractor still has to work. Again, reminder to AgTech startups everywhere, you should always try and use fewer buzzwords in your 15-second elevator pitch and use more grower problems. I’m a broken record on this one (so is Ben Palone) because it’s never changed to date, and it won’t change going forward. So just lock and load on that being the truth for every AgTech solution and every use case.
Fifth (as is often the case with manufacturing items) there are supply chain risks. In this case, Monarch had AgTech that was not working as designed (technology problem) and they had a big problem when its manufacturing partner (yes, the same one that made iPhones, and someone is going to have to convince me why Monarch felt the need to even use that manufacturer? Go ahead, make your case while I grab a cold beverage, a notepad, and press record because I’ll want to save it so I can help make you famous … for being a knucklehead) had to stop making Monarch’s tractors. There are so many differences between an iPhone and a tractor. Where to start? How about this, there are dozens of legitimate custom and standard potential manufacturing partners that can make one offs or repeatable tractors. Clearly it would have been better to go with one of them.
The article correctly points out that John Deere took a different approach to selling autonomous equipment by incorporating autonomous technology into existing products like their 8R tractors. Deere took a slow and steady approach, rolling out marketing for the product at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January of 2022, then making follow on announcements over the past four years as they made progress toward getting the 8Rs into market and rolled out.
So, I look at the failure of Monarch Tractor and come to multiple conclusions:
- The chance for an Elon Musk for tractors is probably gone – like so many NCAA athletes, this was a one and done because I don’t expect any founder after Praveen to be able to pull together the kind of capital needed to truly revolutionize the tractor category like Elon and Tesla did with the Model S. So, the next time someone comes in for a pitch meeting to a venture capitalist pitching about how “he’s got a company that’s going to take over the world and replace all the tractors” hopefully the investor will do the homework needed to validate the claims. Knowing what we learned from Monarch, electric tractors are likely to emerge eventually as a small portion of ag operator’s total fleet of tractors but they’re not replacing all the tractors large operators have, particularly larger tractors like 8Rs. The realization that there is no Elon to be found in the space should help some silly checks not get written. We’ll see.
- Monarch had some unique challenges – the amount of capital raised actually turns out to be one of them. You can’t under-deliver by the range they did and expect to survive without a lot of luck, and Monarch didn’t appear to have a lot of luck. When you get to a $500M valuation and Forbes says you’re going to hit $1B well that can put any startup under massive pressure and an even more massive microscope. This kind of spotlight doesn’t often go well for AgTech startups.
- The EV tractor space does have some use cases, specifically (1) the EV forklifts inside production facilities (like bagged salad facilities) where zero emissions is a big deal and you can plug it in for charging in the same spot every night); and (2) small format mobility solutions like Burro (as above) and Farm-NG (acquired by Bonsai). Of course, any EV tractor maker looking to get started now has to do it with full knowledge that Burro and Amiga are in market and will be making product enhancements between now and the time the new startup hits the market so skate fast young EV startups and skate to where the puck is going to be when you plan to enter the market, not where it is now.
- As I wrote a few weeks back, we all need continue to work hard to keep EV tractors from becoming an over-hyped segment like vertical farming and alt-proteins. Help investors understand the challenges of the space if they reach out to ask questions and help startups better understand their messaging opportunities (and what are not good fits for messaging). If we can stop one foolish investor check from getting written in round 2 of AgTech EV tractor wars, it was worth it.
- One thing that is not mentioned enough in articles about EV tractors is the reality of the lack of electrical grid and infrastructure to support EV tractors at scale in California agriculture. First, many growers have growing regions that are 10-20 miles wide by 20-30 miles deep. Their operations are not contiguous and require flatbeds and lowboys to move equipment around. In many cases, because the moving equipment is elsewhere or the growing rotation goes for weeks, tractors get left at a specific farm for weeks and it is expected it will work whenever the grower needs to use it (because that statement is true for diesel tractors). Most farms (thinking about our ranch for a minute – 4,400 acres of leafy greens and wine grapes on both sides of the Salinas River) do not have power hookups everywhere that are just generally available for plug in charging for a tractor. It would take a lot of capital to set up the infrastructure needed to support regular charging and in some cases you would need to run power lines to additional hook ups – a process that is expensive and not for the faint of heart. The lack of infrastructure in a lot of specialty crop states, including California, is a very real challenge for anyone wanting to build the next EV tractor startup.
