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The Fund Betting That the World's Oldest Industry Is Finally Ready to Change
While most venture money chased apps and ad clicks, a small Atlanta firm went looking for founders willing to fix concrete, steel and 3D-printed homes. Here is how Shadow Ventures built a thesis around the industry software forgot.
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.