Gal Frenkel built a wooden deck and pool in the backyard of his home in central Israel the summer after he had sold luxury wedding/bar mitzvah event planner Sky Productions (opening price for an event: $1 million).

Frenkel hosted a few parties there, and after the summer he didn’t think much about his pool and deck. When he went out to look at it the following spring, he was shocked.

“The whole area looked old and ruined and faded. I was so disappointed,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “I called the guy who installed the deck and said, ‘Nadav, you really messed it up.’ He started laughing. ‘Decks need ongoing maintenance,’ he explained. So, I asked him, ‘Can you do that for me?’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The price will be 10,000 shekels.’”

Frenkel, a consummate entrepreneur, began researching how to fix a deck on the cheap – and maybe prevent this deterioration from happening in the future through proactive maintenance.

“Maintenance, I discovered, is very complex,” Frenkel says. “You need to go through the process at least once or twice a year. It’s a very tedious task and one where there’s been no innovation since 1926 when the pressure washer was invented. But this could be a sweet spot for robotics.”

Robotics, as in a sort of Roomba for outdoor decks?

Not exactly, RoboDeck Chief Product Officer Noam Rand tells ISRAEL21c.

Keep reading at israel21c.org.

RoboDeck is a robotics startup that created an automatic cleaner and preventative maintenance device for outdoor decks. The company’s Co-founder and CTO Ran Zaslavsky is a Technion alumnus.