Inside Tesseract Ventures’ headquarters in Overland Park is a room that’s like something drawn from one of CEO John Boucard’s favorite comic books, video games or science fiction films.
The room, like the company’s name, draws inspiration from a device called a Tesseract from the 2014 movie “Interstellar.” Four walls of touchscreens enclose the custom-built smart space, with a rectangular smart table sitting at the center. An icy-blue glow emanates from the room’s perimeter, where there are cutouts of Tesseract’s logo, a four-dimensional square. It is designed to help users visualize the past, present and future through the use of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Boucard slides one of Tesseract’s Prism devices — a badge containing data tailored to the wearer — and summons graphics and images on the touchscreens, some that show examples of construction sites, crop irrigation patterns and military bases.
The room ultimately is designed to help some of the nation’s crucial decision-makers make smarter choices. A military commander could get a battlefield layout and test various tactics to prepare different combat scenarios. A farmer could see areas with low crop yields and test for solutions to increase production and shore up the nation’s food supply.
Tesseract, like its founder, always has had its sights set on the future. Although Boucard, 51, has always been inventing (from toys to floor-cleaning robots) he considers his 6-year-old startup — the culmination of his life’s work and personal ambition — his most important invention.
The AI and robotics company began growing its operations and reputation largely under the radar, first by selling tech solutions tailored to customers in construction. But Boucard always had grand aspirations of nabbing contracts with military and agriculture clients — a path the company has made significant strides in — by creating tech offerings that range from protecting the nation’s warfighters to addressing its food security.
Why KC?
In another dimension, Tesseract may not have found its way to Kansas City. With its cutting-edge robotics technology — an anomaly in the metro’s tech environment — Tesseract would fit well in the Silicon Valley or New York City startup scenes.
Boucard spent nearly 20 years working for tech companies on the West and East coasts, including Hitachi and Evolution Robotics, before returning to Kansas City in 2018 with his wife, Helena, who also is chief administration officer and government lead at Tesseract.
The move was meant to be temporary, just a six-month stay. Then Boucard ran into Terry Dunn at a local marketing event. They had met years earlier, when Boucard was a 20-year-old intern with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Dunn sat on its board. Upon reconnecting, Dunn was impressed by Boucard’s tech background and ambition, became a mentor of sorts and persuaded him to build the company he envisioned in Kansas City.
“I thought, could I create an invention company that would specialize for the greater good of the country?” Boucard said. “I’ve done all kinds of inventions between entertainment products, robots and toys. But could I create this final company, this series of inventions that’s more narrowly focused on defense and critical infrastructure?”
His ambitions were grand: growing Tesseract into a $1 billion company that transforms how commercial and private industries conduct business — and doing it in Overland Park, where he grew up. From the beginning, Boucard wanted to tackle three massive industries: military, agriculture and construction.
With the support of Dunn, longtime CEO of JE Dunn Construction, Boucard went all-in on making Tesseract into a Kansas City company. He spent three years curating a local investor group, which includes Dunn and UMB Capital Corp., and recruited an executive team with deep local ties and experience with startups. The company also manufactures all of its products in Kansas.
Boucard’s motivations for building Tesseract were as large scale as they were earnest: “I always wanted to be in technology. I always wanted to change the world,” he said.
‘A Midwest Elon Musk’
It took two years for Boucard to develop Tesseract’s first technology, and another two years to build strong ties with military and agriculture customers. But Boucard could always see into the future for Tesseract.
One invention led to the next. Tesseract’s smart room, originally designed for the construction industry, has been repurposed for military and agriculture clients.
That technology was the foundation for a pipeline of companion products ranging from wearable tracking devices designed for construction sites to robotic sensors to drones. The company’s dual-use strategy keeps it nimble and able to roll out new products in a tighter timeframe.
Boucard describes himself as a “hard charger.” If he can imagine it, he’ll do anything to execute on it for customers.
“John is like a Midwest Elon Musk,” said Michael Connor, founder and president of Kansas Capital Holdings, which has invested more than $2 million in Tesseract since 2021. “He’s a brilliant mind. He’s contagious in terms of his enthusiasm, his big ideas, and he has this massive long-term vision. He tells you what he’s going to do, and then he delivers, and he’s relentless about it.”
Early on, Boucard also carved out an intellectual property strategy. Tesseract has accrued hundreds of tech patents, licensing some creations to other companies, often toy and consumer electronic companies, and collecting royalties on each item that’s sold.
One of those licensed inventions is a line of collectible 2-inch-screen TVs featuring scenes from films such as “Back to the Future” and TV shows “The Simpsons” and “Friends.” The toys, sold at Walmart, are a niche revenue generator for Tesseract.
To an outsider — or anyone who isn’t inside Boucard’s brain — Tesseract’s multipronged verticals and gadgets may look disjointed, like different colored puzzle pieces wedged together. Boucard almost prefers it that way.
“In the beginning, we didn’t say a word. It was like, ‘What’s this Tesseract?’ If I didn’t have to say anything about what we were like I wouldn’t,” he said. “Sometimes, when somebody sees us from the outside, it looks like it’s chaos, and that’s fine. Let them think that.”
Boucard has developed a unique, and, upon first and even second glance, disparate business model. But like Tesseract’s suite of tech solutions, it’s seamlessly stacked and interwoven. Each gadget, each software product, each industry, each device plays a role in where Tesseract’s at today and where it’s heading — namely, breaking into the military and agriculture space.
Layering innovation
Everything Tesseract builds is with a specific purpose in mind: solving customers’ unique challenges by making it easier for them to make decisions.
For example, Tesseract is working with Iowa-based Landus Farm Cooperative to create a data visualization tech platform that basically translates Tesseract’s headquarters smart space to a single touchscreen.
The platform, called Synthesis, collects and interprets an array of data from sensors in the soil, on drones and from government agencies to track crop yield; identify weeds, pests or diseases harming production; and see weather data in real-time and offer predictions for future patterns.
“Sometimes it’s hard to diagnose what happened with an area where there’s lower crop yield, which makes it difficult for the farmer to do better next year,” Landwerx Innovation Hub Director Brooke Blessington said; Landwerx is a Landus division that’s collaborating with the Department of Defense.
“By layering some of this information, we can see: Was it an equipment failure? Was it a hybrid crop that didn’t perform the way we thought it would? Was there increased yield or weed pressure that caused some of those issues with it?”
There’s nothing else like it in the agriculture space, Blessington said, because farm equipment and other ag tech tools often live on separate apps and are confined to separate spreadsheets. That makes managing and learning from those disparate data sets almost impossible for farmers.
“Every growing season is critical, not only for our food security and national security, but also for that farmer’s career. Crop yield equates to dollars,” she said. “Synthesis can cut through some of the slowdowns that can happen with product development.”
A military move
Tesseract is on a recent growth kick, hitting on a “right place, right time” momentum, particularly on the military side. In the past couple of years, the military has started to lean on small private companies for drone development, a market that Tesseract announced it broke into in May.
The need in Ukraine, where the U.S. has been providing military equipment, has led to significant demand for this technology, said Travis Fields, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is part of a research team that studies and develops drones and is director of the Missouri Institute for Defense and Energy.
Startups often can build devices faster and more cheaply than large defense contractors like Boeing or Raytheon.
“There’s a big push to have high quantities of drone platforms at little cost and that can be used in a variety of scenarios. That’s going to necessitate some diversity in contractors. You can’t have one or two big prime contractors going after that market,” Fields said. “That’s a good niche for these small businesses that can come in and make moderately complex, somewhat more easily manufactured, but robust aircraft platforms.”
Standing out in this increasingly crowded market comes down to building a better, more unique drone product, he said.
Tesseract’s custom drones stem partly from its Prism technology platform. It originally was built to help construction clients track the location of people and equipment, and was expanded to the agriculture and manufacturing spaces. It also comes down to building a relationship with the Defense Department.
Getting in with the military, before it landed its drone contract with the DoD, took time, Boucard said. Tesseract won million-dollar contracts with the U.S. Air Force in 2022 and the U.S. Space Force in 2023 — and those are just the deals Tesseract has announced. The company expanded its footprint to Tampa in 2022 to better serve its military and Defense Department clients. The relationship can prove to be a long-standing and financially beneficial one.
Where it’s heading
Tesseract has earned a reputation for executing on concepts for customers — no matter how technical or futuristic.
“John is probably one of the great savants in the areas of advanced technology and robotics,” Dunn said. “He can go home, and over a few hours, maybe a weekend, he can basically reinvent an industry in a future state. Very few people have the ability and the vision that he has.”
Boucard likes, and is required by some customers, to keep parts of Tesseract’s operations under wraps. That includes financial information. But after five years of building its tech suite and a devoted customer base, he said, the company is being propelled into a “high-growth phase.” That could mean adding as many as 100 employees in the next year.
Dunn said Tesseract is on track to become a billion-dollar business in the next two to three years.
The startup also has captured the attention of competitors, though Boucard and Dunn wouldn’t name names.
“There are a lot of technology companies that are interacting with us and watching us. Really big ones,” Dunn said.
But Tesseract's 32-person team is charging ahead.
“We're moving much faster than companies 100 times our size. We have an unfair advantage because we invent from nothing to execution and we use our own technology,” Boucard said. “You don't have to play by big corporation rules. We want to solve problems, we want to solve quick, and we want to have the right solutions.”
Original Article: Kansas City Business Journal
By Grace Mayer – Staff Writer, Kansas City Business Journal
Aug 9, 2024
Updated Aug 9, 2024 7:41am CDT
