Summary
Ugur Oezdemir is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Bonsai Robotics, where he leads the company’s vision-based autonomy technology for agricultural equipment. He previously helped build autonomy stacks at Blue River Technology and John Deere and worked as a principal engineer on Airbus’s Vahana self-piloted eVTOL project at A³ (Equilar; LinkedIn).
Career
Oezdemir holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Technische Universität Berlin and later completed an Artificial Intelligence graduate certificate at Stanford University (2018–2020) (LinkedIn; The Org).
He began his career as a research engineer at Fraunhofer IPK in Berlin (2004–2008), then held software engineering internship and engineering roles at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America, Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Laboratory, One Convergence, and Toyota InfoTechnology Center (The Org).
From 2016 to 2019, Oezdemir was a principal engineer at A³ by Airbus in Santa Clara, working on Vahana, Airbus’s self-piloted electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft project (LinkedIn). He also co-founded Mist Labs during this period (around 2015–2017) (The Org).
Oezdemir later joined Blue River Technology, holding roles including Principal Engineer, Robotics Engineering Manager, and Senior Manager of Autonomy, and contributed to vision-based agricultural autonomy work that continued under John Deere after Blue River’s acquisition (Equilar; The Org).
In 2022, he co-founded Bonsai Robotics with Tyler Niday and became CTO, focusing the company’s technology on camera-based autonomy that can operate in dusty, GPS-denied orchard environments. In public comments tied to Bonsai’s funding, he has emphasized using durable automotive cameras and 3D vision techniques rather than systems that fail under harvest dust and unreliable GPS (seed announcement).
Other Ventures
Before Bonsai, Oezdemir co-founded Mist Labs, a short-lived venture listed in his career history between roughly 2015 and 2017 (The Org).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Oezdemir’s LinkedIn profile, The Org career summary, Equilar executive biography materials, and Bonsai’s seed funding announcement. Nationality and birth year are omitted because they are not clearly documented in the sources used here.