The lawn that launched a thousand thoughts
Monday, 22 June 2026
Ben Kepes is a Canterbury-based entrepreneur and professional board member. He is a regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: It was past midnight when I found myself standing at the lounge window, watching a small machine quietly navigate the far corner of my orchard. I hadn’t asked it to do this. It had simply decided the grass needed cutting and got on with it.
I stood there for longer than I’ll admit, and somewhere in that oddly peaceful moment, it struck me that this was exactly the kind of thing most sensible people would have dismissed as science fiction not very long ago.
I should say upfront that I am not a natural early adopter. I still regard smart fridges with mild suspicion and as little more than a gimmick. But after one too many weekends climbing on and off my ride-on mower, burning through petrol, burning through time, doing a job that felt increasingly like it was owning me rather than the other way around, I messaged a mate to ask what the state of autonomous mowing actually was these days.
He pointed me towards Robomate.
Read more:
For those unfamiliar, Robomate is a New Zealand company founded by Lachlan Murray in 2018, which began, as so many of the best Kiwi businesses do, in a garage. Murray’s insight was deceptively simple but genuinely important: New Zealand lawns are not the manicured, pancake-flat suburban rectangles that most robotic mowers had been designed for. Our sections slope, flood, dry out, and generally behave as though they bear a personal grudge against machinery.
Products weren’t failing because the technology was wrong. They were failing because nobody had seriously asked whether the technology had been designed for the right lawn.
That gap is where Robomate lives. As specialist dealers in robotic mowing technology, they source and supply machines suited to the specific demands of New Zealand terrain, and back themselves to know what it takes to use them in our conditions. The company has grown from that original garage into a proper national operation with a warehouse and office on Auckland’s North Shore.
This year, they ranked fifth in the Deloitte Fast 50 after posting more than 400% revenue growth over three years, the kind of number that sounds like a typo until you understand what they actually built.
Through Robomate, I got hold of a Lymow Plus One. I had fully prepared myself for a weekend of frustration, software updates, cryptic beeping, that particular modern despair that comes from standing on your lawn angrily googling error messages while the neighbours pretend not to watch.
Instead, within about an hour, the machine was mapped, configured, and heading off on its first exploratory circuit with an eerie, unhurried confidence.
What struck me wasn’t that it could mow grass. We’ve had machines that do that for over a century. It was the way it moved, working calmly around garden beds, tree roots, awkward cambers and sudden slopes, as though it had been quietly studying the terrain for months.
It simply gets on with the job, on its own schedule, and returns itself to charge when it’s done. My ride-on, by contrast, demands fuel, time, and my full physical presence for hours at a stretch. The contrast, once you’ve experienced it, is almost comic.
But here’s the thing about that midnight vigil, watching the Lymow work its way silently across the lawn: this machine is not the future. It is the present.
And the journey from garage-based insight to a nationally distributed business posting serious growth in under a decade is not simply a technology story. It’s much more of an entrepreneurship story, and a surprisingly instructive one.
Over the years, I’ve mentored a number of young people trying to develop entrepreneurial ideas, and the most common trap is always the same. They treat the quality of the idea as the primary variable, searching for a concept so original and watertight that success becomes almost inevitable.
What they underestimate, almost universally, is everything that comes after having the idea.
Murray’s idea in 2018 was not in itself extraordinary. Robotic mowers already existed. The insight – that New Zealand terrain demanded a different approach and that someone should find the right products and build local distribution around them – was sharp, but not world-altering on paper.
What was significant was the decision to back that insight relentlessly for seven years, through all the uncertainty that entails, until the technology, the market and the execution had aligned well enough to produce the kind of growth that puts you fifth on a national fast-company list.
This is what Bill Gates was pointing at when he observed that we over-estimate what we can achieve in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in 10.
Looking at Robomate today, the whole thing seems inevitable. Of course there was a market for this. Of course New Zealand needed it. But in 2018, betting your time and capital on autonomous lawnmowers being a real business here, when most people still thought of them as an expensive novelty, required a patient, slightly irrational conviction that is genuinely hard to sustain.
The Lymow has now been working my lawn for several months. It is one of the better (non-human) things to have arrived in my life in recent years, not merely for the time and petrol it saves, but for the satisfaction of watching something work exactly as promised, doing, as they say, what it says on the box.
That's the part I try to explain to young entrepreneurs paralysed by the search for a perfect idea.
The idea is the starting gun, not the race.
What matters is the conviction to keep running long after the crowd has thinned, through the years when the outcome is still genuinely unclear.
And sometimes, if you persist long enough and read the future well enough, you wake up one morning to find that the quiet bet you placed half a decade ago is out there doing its job while you sleep.