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.
Tony Xia is a computer vision engineer turned venture scout and startup founder who built his technical chops at DJI, AutoX, and Arraiy (acquired by Matterport) before co-founding Crema Social - a video-call-meets-food-delivery international dating platform that amassed over 1 million signups in 8 months. After graduating from a16z speedrun's Cohort 003, he became a Scout for a16z speedrun, backing pre-seed founders with $10K checks and a direct path into one of Silicon Valley's most competitive accelerators.