HarvestX Inc.
Researching and developing robots for indoor farming
July 2020
26 million JPY
Yuki Ichikawa
355 Entrepreneur Lab,
South Clinical Research Building
The University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongo
Bunkyo Ku, Tokyo 113-0033
Our vision is to enrich people's lives by supplying them with delicious fruits anywhere from cities to deserts and space in the future. As a step toward achieving this goal, we are working on realizing fully automated strawberry cultivation.
There're few plant factories growing fruits though there're many factories for lettuce and other leaf vegetables. The primary reason is difficulty to pollinate in factories which uses artificial light. It's difficult to keep bees under artificial light, and there's no efficient alternative.
Most crops currently rely on insect pollination by honeybees. Hence the development of alternative technologies is essential for stable food production.
We research and develop technology to pollinate and harvest fruits with robots to realize plant factories and fully automated cultivation of fruit and vegetable crops.