Reliable infrastructure to build, deploy and manage real-world robots.
Today we're sharing Agency Tool Company and our first product, ATC Deploy: a faster, more reliable way to ship software to robots wherever they are. It moves updates up to 20 times faster than docker pull or scp and works with any software stack already in use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx0rLRVa06s
The updates that took until 2 a.m.
Davis and I spent eight years building Scythe Robotics and putting hundreds of autonomous mowers to work across the country. For years, we deployed software with a tool I'd cobbled together for our first few robots. As the fleet grew, deployment became an ordeal: engineers stayed up until 2 a.m., we coordinated with customers to move robots out of sheds and into LTE coverage at set times, and failed transfers restarted from zero. Shipping a fix could take more coordination than building it. We had models to train and customers to serve, so the tooling limped along with incremental bandaids.
We've since heard the same story from robotics teams across industries. That deployment becomes a hidden bottleneck: teams become release-averse, feedback loops slow and improvements stall. Stitched-together web and IoT tools barely work if you know which scripts to run and who to call, so they survive, even if it means every update is distracting from improving the product.
What we built
ATC Deploy ships whatever you already run: OS images, Docker images, or any file tree. Run “atc ota push user@robot”, and it sends only the changed bytes, then restarts your software through hooks you define—way faster than a docker push.
Install takes one “curl | sh” command and a config file so you can get back to work fast. Interrupted transfers resume where they stopped, and an offline robot can receive updates by USB if you need. There's no new runtime, packaging format, or operating system to adopt.
Shipping to robots today
ATC Deploy already ships software to robots at Burro, which has deployed more than 750 machines worldwide, Tempo, polishing concrete across several US states and Canada, and Gather, who is scaling their 99.9% accurate inventory drones nationwide. Their teams spend less time managing delivery and more time improving the robot.
Operate a robot fleet? Join the ATC Deploy waitlist at agencytool.com. Know a team that should be using it? Send them this post, or to mailbox@agencytool.com.
It's time to build robots.
