agriculture-robotics
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Brendan Dowdle
Brendan Dowdle is the Chief Business Officer of Bonsai Robotics, a Silicon Valley company building vision-based autonomy software for agriculture. He arrived there in 2025 when Bonsai acquired farm-ng, the modular farm-robot maker he ran as CEO. Dowdle grew up in an agricultural family across Southeast Asia, watched his agronomist father work the ground, and spent a decade building computer-vision and robotics companies before turning that toolkit on farming. He co-founded Arraiy (acquired by Matterport, where he later helped scale the services business through IPO), holds an MBA from Stanford, and now argues that the future of farming will be driven by intelligence, not iron.
Tyler Niday
Tyler Niday is the co-founder and CEO of Bonsai Robotics, a San Jose-based agtech startup building AI-first autonomy software and hardware for farming. With a background in agricultural engineering from Cal Poly SLO and a systems design master's from MIT, Niday spent seven years at Blue River Technology helping develop the landmark See & Spray precision herbicide system before founding Bonsai in 2022. Under his leadership, Bonsai has raised $28.5M in total funding, deployed vision-based autonomy across 500,000+ acres, and in July 2025 acquired farm-ng to combine software expertise with modular electric robotics - positioning the company to be the world leader in autonomy software for intelligent outdoor machines in harsh environments.