Updating Robot Software Is Still a Nightmare. This Startup Wants to Fix That.
Agency Tool Company launches ATC Deploy, a tool that ships software updates to robot fleets over any connection, even sonar, so teams stop losing days to broken scripts and dropped signals.
Key points
- Jack Morrison and Davis Foster, co-founders of robotics firm Scythe Robotics, launched Agency Tool Company on 16 July 2025.
- The company's first product, ATC Deploy, pushes software updates to robot fleets of any size over weak or intermittent connections including satellite and sonar links.
- Launch partners Burro (750-plus field robots), Gather AI (warehouse drones), and Tempo (grinding machines) are testing the tool across three different stages of commercial deployment.
- Agency Tool Company plans a second product, ATC Build, that will let developers test robot software in the cloud on real embedded hardware without hosting it themselves.
- A full commercial rollout of ATC Deploy is expected within months, with early customers onboarding now.
Picture the update screen you stare at when your laptop installs Windows overnight. Straightforward, mostly boring, done by morning. Now imagine doing that for 750 robots scattered across farms, warehouses, and ocean floors, many of them barely holding a signal, some switching off at random. That is the daily headache robotics engineers wake up to.
Jack Morrison has lived that headache. He spent eight years as co-founder of Scythe Robotics, a company that builds autonomous lawnmowers, wrestling with exactly this problem. When he left Scythe roughly a year ago with fellow co-founder Davis Foster, he started talking to other robotics firms. Every one of them described the same pain.
"It's all the same problems," Morrison told The Robot Report.
What does ATC Deploy actually do?
ATC Deploy is a software deployment tool, meaning it handles the job of copying a new version of software onto a machine and making sure it runs correctly. It works with whatever system a company is already using, so teams do not have to rip out their existing setup.
The problem it targets is messier than it sounds. Sending a software update to a single robot sitting on a desk requires managing scripts (small programs that handle each step of the transfer), checking the files did not get corrupted in transit, and restarting the right processes afterward. Multiply that by hundreds of machines and it gets out of hand fast.
Connectivity makes it worse. Robots working outside warehouses often sit on thin mobile connections. Some communicate over sonar because they are underwater. Satellites can deliver connections "measured in bits, not megabits," Morrison said. Robots also shut down unpredictably. An update process that expects a machine to stay online for hours will simply fail.
ATC Deploy is designed to keep moving through all of that, resuming interrupted transfers and working within whatever bandwidth a robot actually has.
Who is using it right now?
Three launch partners are already building with the tool, each at a different point in their commercial life.
| Partner | What they build | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Burro | Agricultural and outdoor robots | 750-plus in the field |
| Gather AI | Warehouse inventory drones | Deployed in warehouses |
| Tempo | Grinding machines for customer sites | Early field deployments |
Burro, with the largest fleet, wants to reduce bandwidth use and avoid rebuilding its whole software setup to adopt something new. Tempo is still mostly working in its own office. Both care about the same things, just at very different speeds.
Morrison also wants the tool to work for a single student with one robot. "If you are an undergraduate in robotics and you just want to install your first ROS application," ROS being the Robot Operating System, a popular open-source framework robots use to run tasks, "we want to make it one click or one command line run."
What comes next for the company?
ATC Deploy is only the first piece. The next product, ATC Build, will let developers test software on real robot hardware hosted in the cloud, so a small team does not need to buy and maintain its own test rigs. Think of it as renting time on actual robot brains rather than simulating them on a laptop.
For engineers building robots right now, the practical upside is fewer late nights nursing broken update scripts and more time spent on the parts of their work that actually require them.
