Summary
Tyler Niday is the co-founder and CEO of Bonsai Robotics, a San Jose company building vision-based AI autonomy for orchard and farm equipment. Before founding Bonsai in 2022, he spent seven years at Blue River Technology and John Deere, where he worked on See & Spray and helped start the company’s autonomy engineering effort (Robotics Summit biography).
Career
Niday earned a Bachelor of Science in BioResource and Agricultural Engineering from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) and later completed a Master of Science in Engineering and Management through MIT’s System Design and Management program, including a 2022 thesis on architecting enterprises for disruptive innovation (The Org; MIT DSpace).
Early in his career he worked as a system engineer at Cal Poly’s Irrigation Training and Research Center (2009–2012), then as a research and development engineer at Orchard Machinery Corporation (OMC) from 2012 to 2015, designing mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and drive-by-wire systems for tree-nut harvest equipment (The Org; Robotics Summit biography).
From 2015 to 2022, Niday worked at Blue River Technology and, after John Deere’s acquisition of Blue River, inside Deere’s autonomy organization. He has described himself as an early engineer on the first See & Spray machine and as the founding engineer on John Deere’s production autonomous tractor effort, later serving as Head of Engineering for Construction Autonomy (LinkedIn; Robotics Summit biography).
In 2022, Niday co-founded Bonsai Robotics with Ugur Oezdemir to bring vision-first autonomy to harsh orchard and off-road environments where GPS- and LIDAR-centered systems often fail. As CEO, he has led the company through a $13.5 million seed round in 2023, a $15 million Series A in 2025, commercial OEM integrations with partners such as OMC and Flory, and the July 2025 acquisition of farm-ng.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Niday’s LinkedIn profile, his Robotics Summit speaker biography, The Org career summary, and his MIT SDM thesis record. Degree naming differs slightly across secondary sources (mechanical versus agricultural engineering); the BioResource and Agricultural Engineering wording follows The Org’s education listing and his early irrigation and orchard-equipment career path.