When Tyler Niday watched farmers in California’s almond orchards struggle to find enough workers to keep up with harvest demands, he saw both a problem and an opportunity. Drawing on his background in agtech robotics, he set out to design machines that could handle the unforgiving conditions of agriculture, dusty rows, uneven terrain, and the relentless demands of harvest.
The result was agtech startup Bonsai Robotics, which is now using AI and computer vision to tackle those challenges head-on, offering growers not just innovation, but a badly needed solution to a growing labor crisis.
Before founding Bonsai, Niday spent seven years at Blue River Technology, helping pioneer See and Spray technology and later autonomy. When embedded AI became viable, the company pivoted to AI-powered precision spraying, leading to its acquisition by John Deere, where Niday became the first engineer on the autonomy team. “That experience gave me a front-row seat to how AI and precision agriculture could transform farming, scaling from zero to one and then one to many,” he says.
Prior to that, at Orchard Machinery Corporation, he had designed equipment and software for the tree nut industry, working across mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and drive-by-wire systems, an early lesson in blending hardware with software. Together, these roles highlighted both the promise and the gaps in bringing autonomy to farming.
He says: “Growers face labor shortages, rising costs, and equipment that isn’t always designed for their realities. Growers don’t want to hear futuristic concepts; they need autonomy that works today, in their fields, under real conditions. That’s what led me to start Bonsai Robotics: to deliver autonomy that’s practical, reliable, affordable, and built for the way farms actually work.”
Today, Bonsai is focused on specialty crops where automation is least developed, and farmer pressures are most acute. Labor costs here are 30 to 50 times higher per acre than in open-field crops because the work requires dexterity, diverse crop handling, and navigating varied terrain.
While the company is starting with specific crop environments, its autonomy platform is built to adapt and scale across many. Ultimately, Bonsai enables true precision agriculture, making it cost-effective for growers to manage crops at the plant level rather than the block or field level.
Bonsai has faced tough challenges in making autonomy reliable in the real world, while also ensuring the autonomy could work with existing and next-generation machinery. The team had to prove value quickly. “We did that by focusing on real-world deployments and OEM partnerships so growers could see results in their fields, not just in presentations,” says Niday. “And building the right team was essential. We’ve assembled experts in ag, robotics, and AI who share the same mission of bringing autonomy to growers in a practical way.”
In July this year, Bonsai acquired farm-ng, a pioneer in modular electric robots for farm management. Its flagship product, the Amiga, is designed to serve small- and mid-sized farms, research institutions, and developers.
Niday described the move as a natural fit because of a shared philosophy. He says: “Bonsai has always focused on vision-based autonomy, while farm-ng built modular, electric robotics designed with autonomy in mind, lightweight, customizable, and adaptable to any environment. Together, this combination lets us bring autonomy to core tasks like spraying, mowing, and weeding, which represent a significant share of costs in specialty crops and still lack effective automation solutions today.”
Adding farm-ng’s hardware expertise has also allowed Bonsai to iterate faster with OEM partners, helping them deploy state-of-the-art vision autonomy across their fleets. “Whether upgrading the equipment they already own or choosing a Bonsai-enabled machine, it’s a platform that grows with them over time,” says Niday.
The response from growers has been overwhelmingly positive. With farm-ng’s modular, electric vehicles, they now have low-horsepower machines that can be tailored for specific tasks, working efficiently and cost-effectively alongside their larger equipment.
Bonsai is headquartered in San Jose, with test farms in Watsonville and Davis, California, keeping them close to growers and their needs. Current key markets are specialty crop agriculture in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, with deployment of autonomy for high-value commercial applications, like spraying, mowing, and weeding in orchard, vineyard and bedded crop environments.
To date, the company has delivered over 250 Amiga units to growers, researchers, and developers in these environments, and executed more than 45 commercial deployments with leading OEM partners such as OMC and Flory.
Olam Orchards Australia partnered with Bonsai because of a shared commitment to AI, innovation, sustainability, and resilient supply chains, making the collaboration a natural fit. While it is early days, according to Brad Taggert, assistant general manager of orchard operations, working with Bonsai has opened up new ways of thinking about how AI and autonomy can support their business.
He says: “The collaboration has given our teams greater visibility into opportunities to optimize processes, improve decision-making, and explore more sustainable approaches across our value chain. Just as importantly, it has reinforced our culture of innovation, helping us test new models and learn quickly. The partnership is about building a foundation for smarter, more resilient growth in the future.”
Bonsai Robotics has attracted interest from investors, including Acre Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on the food and agriculture tech sectors, which aligns with Bonsai’s mission to develop physical AI solutions for the agricultural industry.
Managing partner Lucas Mann says: “Bonsai is building a full-stack off-road autonomy company. Machines enabled with their platform don’t just perform in some of the world’s toughest environments; they’re redefining what’s possible. By seamlessly integrating with OEM platforms, Bonsai is accelerating the adoption of autonomy at scale. What truly sets them apart is the team: unmatched expertise forged in agriculture, now extending across industries where rugged, reliable autonomy is a game-changer. The market is taking notice, and Bonsai is poised to lead the next wave of automation.”
In the short term, Bonsai’s priority is integrating its autonomy stack with the Amiga platform and making it fully manageable through the app. Beyond that, the focus will be expanding to more use cases within specialty crops, where labor intensity and input costs are highest, and then extending to other crop types such as broad-acre farming.
“Longer term, we are extending beyond agriculture into adjacent industries, including mining, construction, and defense, that demand ruggedized off-road autonomy solutions,” adds Niday. “Our mission is to become the de facto agtech autonomy platform across crops, geographies, and industries.”
Read on forbes.com
