Monarch Tractor’s assets have been acquired by construction giant Caterpillar after it struggled to pivot into a software services business, according to filings with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The acquisition, first was mentioned from Bloomberg, it caps a rough couple of years for Monarch as it has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, been sued by three different dealers and lost a major contract manufacturing partner to Foxconn. It also comes just weeks after co-founder and wine lover Carlo Mondavi he said “pushed out” after disagreeing with CEO Praveen Penmetsa’s approach to software promotion.
Mondavi could not immediately be reached for comment. Penmezza declined to comment beyond Monarch’s statement issued last weekwhich said its technology had been acquired by an unspecified “major global equipment manufacturer”. Caterpillar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Monarch has raised more than $200 million over the past eight years. It was founded in 2018 by Mondavi, Penmetsa and former Tesla executive Mark Schwager. The goal was to build “driver-optional” electric tractors that could also navigate autonomously through wineries, fruit farms and dairy farms.
While Monarch initially started building the small tractors at its own facility in Livermore, California, it eventually became one of four companies that partnered with Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn to occupy a former General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Foxconn planned to build vehicles for EV startups Fisker, Lordstown Motors and IndiEV, as well as tractors for Monarch. But Foxconn only built a few electric trucks for Lordstown Motors (from which it bought the factory) before that company went bankrupt. Fisker and IndiEV also went bankrupt before Foxconn could build those companies’ future vehicles at the factory. Foxconn built a few hundred Monarch tractors at the plant, but the electronics giant sold the plant in August 2025 to SoftBank, leaving Monarch without a manufacturer.
At that point, Monarch was already struggling. It laid off staff in early 2024 before closing a $133 million funding round. Just a few months later it laid off even more employees and said it was restructuring to focus on software and licensing its autonomous technology.
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Dealers who bought Monarch tractors claimed the company’s autonomous technology never worked well in the first place. A dealer who sued Monarch in September 2025 said the tractors were “defective” and “couldn’t operate autonomously.” (Monarch denied the claims in a court filing.) Two other dealers have since filed similar federal lawsuits against Monarch. In one case, a former defense attorney for Monarch wrote a Jan archiving that Monarch entered into an assignment for the benefit of creditors — alternative to Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Mondavi spoke about his departure last month in a comment on an Instagram post from a farmer who complained about Monarch tractors. The winemaker wrote that he “left over a year ago due to fundamental differences in approach” after seeing “reliability issues” with Monarch tractors on his farm and the farms of friends.
“I wanted to address them through hardware changes, while the CEO believed they could be solved more through software. I strongly believed in a different path, but it eventually got blocked and I was pushed out along with another co-founder,” he wrote.
The company was auctioned most of its remaining tractors earlier this year.
