Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
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.