field-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.
Bonsai Robotics
Bonsai Robotics is a San Jose-based agricultural autonomy company that builds vision-first AI systems for off-road farm equipment. Founded in 2022 by veterans of Blue River Technology and John Deere, the company's Intelligence Platform combines embedded autonomy software with retrofittable hardware kits to let existing and new farm machinery operate with minimal human input - even in GPS-denied fields, at night, and in heavy dust. With $28.5M raised and its July 2025 acquisition of farm-ng, Bonsai is expanding from specialty-crop orchards into bedded-crop row farming and modular electric robot platforms.