Today we'd like to share with you the beginnings of our story – how it all started and what our path looked like from the very beginning, straight from our CEO Michael Utkin. 🙂 👇
"It all started for me at the end 1980s when my father who was an engineer and the head of a microelectronics research laboratory was given a task by the communist party to create a way that agriculture machines could be driven without humans. He created a controller with the help of which one operator could control 10 machines at the same time. It was a breakthrough technology, the only problem with that was that the cost of the controller was many times more than a tractor. Thus I follow in the footsteps of my father and try to bring the latest technology to all the farmers and not just a few.
With that mission in mind, I and my partner Oleksii started a company in 2014, when we created a business plan and got accepted to the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands. We've received a grant and technical support to develop our idea. Our mobile app was created and published on Google Play, quickly becoming the most popular app for farmers in the world. Through this app, we have connected to tens of thousands of farmers and learned what exactly their expectations of this product are. In 2016 we created a crowdfunding campaign, raising funds from farmers in 20 countries for our RTK GPS receiver together with the mobile app: a manual tractor guidance system.
After this initial success, some tractor OEMs contacted us and asked if we had a tractor steering system. The OEMs liked the idea that the product was easy to use, inexpensive, as well as offering remote support, and easy to transfer between machines. In 2018 we launched our first steering system which was quite successful, selling more than 1000 units, but the technology was reliant on components of a 3rd party and it was still too expensive.
In 2021 we started the development of the new steering system – PowerSteer. The development process was sadly interrupted by the war with russia. The Company moved our R&D and production from Ukraine to Poland, in 2022, we have asked farmers to pre-order the PowerSteer system and help us finish the development.
In 2023 we've sold more than 1500 units of PowerSteer, while this year we continue improving our main products and develop new ones with our 90-person team in 5 countries."