Naware founder Mark Boysen first tried killing weeds with drones and a 200-watt laser.
He’d been noodling on ideas for a startup with some friends, and thinking about how his family in North Dakota had lost three members to cancer, something they suspected may be related to chemicals in the groundwater. Finding a chemical-free way to kill weeds seemed like a solid option.
But the laser was a dead end. There’s too much risk of starting a fire, he told TechCrunch in an interview. After a lot of trial-and-error prototyping with ideas like cryogenics. The solution he settled on — which he showed off earlier this year at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 — is steam.
Boysen’s company has developed a system that uses computer vision to spot weeds in lawns and fields and golf courses, and kill them with nothing but vaporized water. It can be attached to mowers, or tractors, or even ATVs. At the moment, Naware is flexible, and Boysen is visibly eager for his idea to spread fast — much like the weeds he’s trying to kill.
In a world of agentic AI and billion-dollar software companies, Naware stands out as a classic garage startup story. Boysen said his team first tested the use of steam by ordering a “rinky dink” garment steamer off of Amazon. After that, they ordered seven more.
“They’re not real industrial,” Boysen said he quickly realized. “And so there’s a lot of research helping to develop that, to get to the point of: ‘how do we make this effective and make it repeatable so it can scale?’”
Developing the steamer tech was one challenge, but the bigger one may have been id …