Just two years ago, Monarch Tractor was worth half a billion dollars and ready to shake up the wine industry. In April, it shut its headquarters, laid off its employees and sold its technology to a competitor.
The wine-country startup wanted to revolutionize the cultivation of grapes and other fruit with $100,000 robotractors, but the technology didn’t work well enough. At a time when Waymo’s impressive success and the advent of AI have rekindled excitement about everything driverless, Monarch’s failure to disrupt has become another cautionary tale about massive bets on the latest tech.
The driver optional, battery-powered tractors — built skinny enough to fit in the narrow lanes between the rows of grapevines near its headquarters in Livermore — were going to make it easier and cheaper to handle pests, irrigation and harvesting. They were supposed to use cameras and sensors to collect data, learn what works best and then share that learning online with thousands of other high-tech tractors.
On the back of hopes it could save farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Monarch tractor made Time magazine’s list of the year’s best inventions in 2023. That same year, Monarch was on a Forbes list of startups most likely to reach a $1-billion valuation. It made it halfway there the following year.
“Every farmer around the world is under tremendous pressure because of a lack of labor,” Monarch Chief Executive Praveen Penmetsa told Forbes in 2023, projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. “We are the only all-electric, smart, driver-optional tractor in the world that farmers can buy today.”
But just as the technology seemed poised to move from moonshot to mainstream, customer complaints started coming in.
Patrick O’Connor, who runs Moonvine Wines, an organic vineyard near the Sierra Foothills wine region, was one of the first users and said the tractors too often went rogue, veering off straight paths and damaging his vines.
“It totally failed,” O’Connor said in an Instagram video. “While I was excited to eliminate diesel, run off my solar panels and embrace new technology, it just did not perform. It was actually quite dangerous.”
The potentially world-changing technology wasn’t working as designed. Meanwhile, Monarch hit a wall when its manufacturer — the same company that makes most iPhones — had to stop making the tractors.
“Building and scaling a new tractor platform in agriculture came with unforeseen challenges,” the company said in a statement in April.
Monarch and its founders did not respond to requests for comments.
The company was launched in 2018 with a promising pedigree.
Its founding team included Tesla veteran Mark Schwager and Napa Valley wine scion Carlo Mondavi, the grandson of Napa legend Robert Mondavi.
Penmetsa, the chief executive, had worked for years in the automotive and EV industries, largely in and around Los Angeles.
The company set out with the ambitious goal of bringing battery power, data collection and driverless technology to tractors. If it could pull it off, it could change farming around the world.
The Californian wine industry has been struggling with rising competition and dwindling demand, which could have nudged more farmers to try to save money using Monarch’s technology. It also could have made farmers more cautious about using unproven and expensive new technology.
Monarch may have aimed too high, industry insiders said.
While Monarch was trying to solve two problems at once — making its tractor both electric and autonomous — it didn’t spend enough time thinking about farmers’ needs, said Walter Duflock, vice president of innovation for the Western Growers Assn. Duflock owns San Bernardo Rancho, a fifth-generation family ranch in south Monterey County.
“The electric tractor has struggled to find a use case on the farm,” Duflock said in an interview. “They never got to the point where their electric vehicle was solving a fundamental problem.”
On Duflock’s ranch and many other California farms, there’s little to no charging infrastructure, he said. Even if infrastructure was developed, the time it takes to charge an electric tractor is too long for most farmers who can’t have downtime during busy seasons.
“The notion of sitting there waiting for a charging tractor to finish getting charged just doesn’t fit,” Duflock said.
Duflock heard that the Monarch tractor “would bump into stuff, it would not stop fast enough,” he said. “It just did not work.”
Monarch’s collapse was gradual. In July 2024, the company laid off 15% of its workforce, followed by another round of layoffs in November that year that affected around 35 employees, or 10% of its workforce. A year later, the company warned employees it could lay off 100 workers or even “shut down” in a company-wide memo obtained by TechCrunch.
In November 2025, Monarch Tractor was sued by the Idaho-based dealership Burks Tractor, which accused Monarch of misrepresenting its autonomous technology.
Burks Tractor paid Monarch more than $770,000 for 10 tractors.
“Upon receiving the tractors, Burks Tractor discovered that the tractors did not perform as represented and were unable to operate autonomously,” the complaint said.
A Burks Tractor manager declined to comment due to the ongoing litigation.
Monarch’s vehicles were supposed to be manufactured at a facility in Ohio owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics company known for assembling iPhones. Foxconn sold the factory in August 2025, shutting down Monarch’s plans there.
In April, Monarch sold the technology it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing to construction giant Caterpillar, for an undisclosed amount.
“It means the technology will continue to move forward,” with another company, Monarch said in a LinkedIn post at the time. “Thank you to our employees, investors and customers for being a part of this journey.”
Caterpillar did not respond to requests for comment.
Other companies are plowing forward where Monarch has failed.
For example, farm equipment company John Deere has had more success marketing and selling autonomous farm equipment. It has taken a different approach, gradually incorporating autonomous technology into its existing products. The company’s 8R tractor can operate autonomously while being controlled by a smartphone and has been deployed at large-scale commodity farms growing corn, soy and wheat.
Organic vineyard owner O’Connor still uses his Monarch tractor, but only as a battery and to cut wood with an attachment he has added.
