Nearly three months after San Jose-based agtech start-up Bonsai Robotics acquired modular robot maker Farm-ng, the company is sharing its combined vision for autonomous specialty crop farming with a new robot revealed at this week’s FIRA USA 2025 event in Woodland, Calif.
The Amiga Flex is a small ATV-sized electric vehicle that can perform tasks, like weeding, towing equipment and scouting crops, the company shared in a press release. The robot has a combined payload of 800 lb., a lift of 700 lb., and a capacity of 1,600 lb. — more than the previous Farm-ng vehicles.
Additionally, every Amiga vehicle (not just the Flex) will run Bonsai Intelligence, a compute and sensor suite that empowers navigation, perception, and task execution. Bonsai Intelligence is available through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
The flex vehicle joins Bonsai Robotics’ full suite of Amiga robots, including the low-clearance Max and the compact Trax.
“Bonsai Intelligence has been proven in commercial deployments around the world and now powers our new Amiga lineup. This allows us to deliver affordable, high-performance autonomy that works across mixed fleets. Whether upgrading existing machines or choosing a Bonsai-enabled system, our platform meets customers where they are and scales with them. It helps manage all equipment and operations from one connected platform, anytime, anywhere,” Tyler Niday, CEO and co-founder of Bonsai Robotics, said in a release.
How Bonsai is developing new automation form factors post Farm-ng acquisition
Flex’s launch marks the first commercial release following Bonsai’s acquisition of Farm-ng for an undisclosed amount of money, as AgTechNavigator previously reported.
A key reason for Bonsai acquiring Farm-ng was the two companies’ shared vision of developing new form factors for automated specialty crop growing, Brendan Dowdle, Bonsai chief business officer and former Farm-ng CEO, told AgTechNavigator.
However, “ag is not one monolithic market,” so software and hardware need to be purpose-built to address the specific aspect of the industry, Dowdle explained. This is why Bonsai maintains an open platform through API, where developers can create their own solutions on top of the agtech company’s existing capabilities, he noted.
“We feel that the future of agricultural applications will be done more autonomously, and that autonomy can be best unlocked with new form factors — form factors that do not exist today. We also have a shared vision that we do not want to exclude existing form factors, meaning the existing OEMs and the existing equipment today,” Dowdle elaborated.
Looking ahead, Bonsai is investing in end-to-end AI models, like visual learning models (VLMs), to empower automation innovation, Dowdle explained. VLMs combine AI with computer vision and natural language processing, allowing the software to make connections between text and visual data, IBM described.
“We are really starting to invest in more of what we call foundational models for outdoor autonomy that ultimately would allow the solutions that we built to be deployed much quicker into varying environments and be able to handle varying conditions in very robust ways,” Dowdle added.
