The news of Monarch Tractor's $60M raise, just a few months after its last round, with backing from CNH, a leader in the agricultural equipment market, is great validation of the need for Gridtractor.
Pretty much all successful technologies follow the same path. The initial focus is on the "thing" itself, whether it is the PC, Salesforce.com or Tesla, followed by competition from startups or from entrenched industry players trying to keep up, and an ecosystem that emerges to help end customers manage and get more value from the core technology.
One of the signals that prompted us to launch Gridtractor was the emergence of that kind of ecosystem around passenger and commercial electric vehicles and the fact that one of the leaders in our sector is going to increase production by an order of magnitude in the next two years is a bright flashing green light.
The buyers of those tractors will need to figure out their electrification strategy, will want the extra ROI to be earned from smart charging and grid integration and will need to manage growing fleets of electric assets. Gridtractor will help them!
