Wesley Pitts
Making the Cut
If you’ve seen robots mowing grass on the UT campus lately, a junior Haslam undergrad has something to do with it.
Wesley Pitts grew up in Eastern Europe where his parents served as missionaries in Hungary. While a high school student at an international Christian school in Budapest, Pitts’s natural interest in entrepreneurship emerged. At 16, he started a landscaping business that catered to expatriates and included property management services.
Budapest exposed him to technologies that hadn’t yet caught on in the U.S.—such as robotic mowing. “My junior year of high school, I saw my first robotic mower and followed it for 45 minutes,” Pitts says. “I knew I wanted to bring that to the U.S.”
His Knoxville connections and interest in business led Pitts to apply to Haslam. Although he considers himself a poor test-taker and had no ACT score to submit, UT accepted Pitts on the basis of the essay he submitted with his application.
Pitts is pursuing a degree in management with an entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises track and a collateral in sales and marketing. Meanwhile, he serves in the Tennessee Air National Guard to help pay for school.
Inspired by the technology he had seen years earlier in Budapest, Pitts and a friend started KnoxBots, a company that sells and leases robotic mowers as well as subscription-based service packages in the Knoxville area. KnoxBots acquired LLC status in January 2023, the same year Pitts won a combined $25,000 in funding from the Boyd Venture Challenge and the Graves Business Plan Competition through Haslam’s Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
KnoxBots earned $123,000 in revenue its first year, and the company currently operates robotic mowers on the UT campus, the 134th Air Refueling Wing at McGhee Tyson Airport, and multiple golf courses. Recently, Pitts created TerraSYNC, a nationwide version of KnoxBots, and launched a site in West Palm Beach, Florida, with plans to expand to two other cities.
Beyond his lawn care business, Pitts also co-founded another Knoxville-area enterprise, Pink Apron Logistics, which bakes its own authentic European pastries and delivers them to local coffee shops. Pink Apron recently catered an event for UT Athletics at Neyland Stadium.
In addition to nurturing two businesses after graduation, Pitts hopes to establish a nonprofit to help new entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. “I want to give others the opportunities for success that I’ve had,” he says. “My ultimate goal is to invest in young entrepreneurs and give them, at no cost, the resources they need to succeed.”