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. “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 identifying the weeds, Boysen said. It’s well-established that artificial intelligence software can be trained to accurately recognize objects or patterns, but the “green-on-green” problem was tough, he said — especially because the software has to recognize the weeds in real time while the rig is prowling over a lawn. (And yes, it’s using Nvidia GPUs.)

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He thinks they’ve gotten there, though. He said Naware is targeting companies that do lawn care for athletic fields and golf courses, and claims his company can save customers like that “anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 on chemicals alone.”

On top of that, he said customers will save money by not having to pay for people whose only job is to spray those chemicals. Naware has been doing paid pilots to test and dial in the product, but Boysen’s pitch has already attracted prospective partners, he said.

“We’re going after the strategic partnerships. We’re in discussions with $5 billion companies that do equipment manufacturing that are interested in our product. And we’re a couple conversations into that — I can’t say their name, but you’ll figure it out,” he laughed.

Success, Boysen said, will take three things: those partnerships, securing patents, and funding. Boysen has been bootstrapping Naware for now but said he’ll open its first fundraising round in the coming months.