We’re retrofitting heavy machinery to increase productivity on work sites, starting with compactors on landfills.
Heavy machinery refers to large equipment, such as bulldozers, excavators, and dump trucks, commonly seen in construction or heavy industry. Compactors, specifically, are heavy machines with spiked wheels that roll over and crush trash to compress it into denser piles.
We’re Kayra Yasa and Xavier Dedenbach. We met at Terraform Industries, a deep tech startup in Los Angeles, synthesizing natural gas from air, water, and sunlight. We realized we shared an obsession with increasing the productivity of heavy machinery, bottlenecked by the one machine to one operator convention, and decided to start Tango.
Xavier has an extensive background in drive-by-wire autonomy systems. He’s built analogous autonomy projects through Motivo, such as the Monarch autonomous electric tractor and electric boats at Arc. Xavier has rare hardware full-stack capability.
Kayra has a background in materials science, discovering a natural knack for it when she solved an MIT postdoc’s polymer research at 16. She became one of the first employees at biotech startup Virex Health at 20 (acquired by Sorrento Therapeutics shortly after), and was most recently at COTU Ventures, an early-stage VC fund in the Middle East, unlocking the closed-off Saudi startup market from scratch.
We thrive in demanding, fast-paced, hands-on environments. Waste management is a neglected, less prestigious, and yet vital industry with durable margins, which are our opportunity.
Autonomy technology is now commoditized. It used to be a deep tech challenge with uncertain approaches to navigation, position detection, environmental awareness, and vehicle control, but it’s a very different world now. We are following a wave of autonomy development that has started to pick winners like Waymo and Tesla, leading to cheaper sensor solutions, best practice system architectures, and better compute. This enables smaller teams like us to focus more on use cases, delivering value, and the true pain of robotics, which is in execution and daily operations. Machines vibrate (a lot), it’s dusty, muddy, the environment around can still be variable, and everything always goes wrong. It’s a tenacity game, much like anything else in this world worth building.
