“At the heart of what I’m doing is I am trying to build the resources to help people,” Wesley Pitts, the founder of TerraSync and former UT Haslam student, said. “The reason why I build and grow this business is that I’m building something bigger than me. I’m building something that impacts people’s lives.”
While living in Budapest, Hungary, as a high school student and the son of two missionaries, Pitts ran a lawn mowing business where he discovered innovative robotic lawn mowers. Fast forward to January 2023, Pitts — then a UT Haslam student — launched TerraSync, his own autonomous robotic ground maintenance business designed to maintain lawns, golf courses and athletic fields inspired by the robotic lawn mowers he saw in Budapest.
TerraSync, formerly known as KnoxBots, is a human-operated robot controlled via a command center dashboard, allowing operators to perform a variety of ground-maintenance tasks, including mowing, painting lines, monitoring soil health and managing water use to ensure zero waste. The robot also integrates with Google Calendar to allow users to schedule ground maintenance and track live weather conditions.
The robotic innovation addresses problems in ground maintenance by reducing labor costs and the amount of labor required, supporting Pitt’s mission to serve others.
TerraSync reports that its autonomous ground-maintenance technology reduces mowing labor by 96%. By reducing the labor required to maintain grounds, TerraSync also lowers labor costs, a prevalent issue as ground maintenance labor costs rose by 10.2% in 2023.
TerraSync has transformed since its founding in 2023.
“They typically say a business is three pivots away from its success … ” Pitts said. “We had our three pivots: residential to commercial, commercial to integration and integration to IT in the space.”
TerraSync itself doesn’t replace jobs because humans operate it.
“While there is a lot of talk about AI taking jobs, the TerraSync team is the perfect counter-story,” UT junior Summer Scott, a marketing and PR intern at TerraSync, said. “We aren’t replacing people — we’re showing how the next generation of Vols can lead by ‘orchestrating’ high-tech fleet.”
Pitts, a current startup coach at Haslam, believes his experience in the business college was “pivotal” to his success as an entrepreneur, especially because he leveraged his student status and the school’s resources to network professionally through his emerging business.
“It was the one time in my life that (I) could use the excuse of being in college to get whatever (I) want,” Pitts said. “I can go to any golf course and say I am working on a current project for college, and they would let me run my mowers there. I can go and say, ‘Hey, I am a student,’ and I am more willing to win a bid at UT than someone who isn’t a student or an alumni.”
Pitts won over $50,000 in a series of pitch competitions for his autonomous robotic lawn-mowing technology, as well as a variety of additional awards, including the Graves Business Plan Competition, the Boyd Venture Challenge twice, and first place at Innovate 365.
“You have all of these benefits as a student, and you are, like, the underdog, and everybody wants you to be successful, and so I took advantage of that,” Pitts said.
