Larry Ellison is probably best known for being the founder and executive director Oracle, a close commissioner of President Trump. But he also spent years quietly building a startup vertical cultivation. Even after a lot of time and almost $ 500 million in investment, the company is still struggling to take off, and their wound farms indoors compared with more of the project itself than something that received almost half a billion dollars of capital.
AND Wall Street Journal there are a A new story In detail is all the problems that have won the Sensei, and what is most stood out for is how many problems are pedestrians. Sensei initially focused on the construction of vertical farms on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which, of course, is mostly owned by Ellison. Somehow, despite living on the island, Ellison did not anticipate that a unique environment would represent problems:
The winds have repeatedly blows roofs from the greenhouse. Ellison said the structures would cost $ 12 million, but in the end they cost closer to $ 50 million, both from the damage and because of the cost of expenses, according to people who are familiar with the issue.
Ellison said the greenhouses, a total of 120,000 square meters, would be out of the network, launched with solar plates thanks to a partnership with Tesh. But the panels often failed. Strong winds showering them with dirt and debris, and there were questions about whether they were properly set up, according to one of the people.
Instead, fans, water pumps and other needs were often triggered by diesel generators.
Wi-Fi problems meant cameras and high-tech sensors, which were to monitor the health of crops and control such things as the shades of the windows, also did not act as planned.
A large -scale agricultural cultivation was a dream of an agricultural technology sector that returns for more than a century, and in some pockets of the world A promised promise. Vice President JD Vance and Brother Elona Male Cymbal have both took cracks when using technology For the production of vegetables indoors, the idea that food can become more accessible and more accessible if it can be grown locally, in any environment, and technology replaces expensive labor. Consider a traditional greenhouse that grows crops like tomatoes, but in a much larger scale, with artificial lighting that allows vegetables to grow in any season.
The soil is not ideal for commercial agriculture on Lanai, and the island must introduce 80-90% of its food. Many places around the world have similar conditions and could theoretically benefit from vertical farms.
But vegetables are cheap goods, and the initial costs for the construction of these startups have made products more expensive than consumers are willing to pay. Startups of vertical agriculture such as Sensei require expensive artificial lighting and have other complex operational needs, as well as all that crop monitoring software. Large, heavy crops like corn are not necessarily suitable for the internal farm either because they have a long growth cycle and it is difficult to support their weight in a complex system. This partly explains why many startups of vertical agriculture focused on the salad heads.
Both Vance and Musk Startups generally failed to achieve their goals – Appharvest, an agricultural startup in which Vance was the main investor, filed bankruptcy in 2023. Musk’s Square Roots fired most of his staff the same year.
In addition to technical challenges, these startups struggled to reach an economy of scale. Similar to a startup like Wework, which had a similarly bad economy, Sensei is not a traditional starting of a silicon valley that builds applications that can be reduced very quickly. There is a reason why Uber and Airbnb prefer not to have any property. Sensei builds capital intense, a physical job that needs many money and patience to achieve a point where crops can be profitable.
Fortunately, Ellison is one of the richest people in the world and can afford to spend $ 500 million on something he believes in – though Magazine The article states that he could lose patience. Sensei has recently retired from Lanai and now tests surgery in southern California, where the company prototypes a new system that uses robotics; He also tests his robots in an existing greenhouse in Burbank. Things could ultimately succeed in Sensei if Ellison’s friend President Trump manages to delete all the workforce of migrant agricultural agriculture, as it seems to hope, leaving robots as our last hope that they will grow vegetables.