US Billionaire Larry Ellison launches Sensei

Oracle’s billionaire founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison has launched a new business, called Sensei, a new L.A.-based company that will focus on developing hydroponic farms. Ellison co-founded the company with his long-time friend, David Agus, a prolific author and professor of medicine at USC.

According to Sensei’s president, Dan Gruneberg, Ellison and Agus came up with the idea of starting a wellness company when a close mutual friend of the two was dying and they decided there was more they could, and should, do.

Step one seemed to involve building a hydroponic farm on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which Ellison acquired back in 2012. There the Sensei team will be focusing not on yield per hectare but nutrition per hectare, which is a central idea and a selling point for the fruits and vegetables produced there.

Techcrunch.com explains how hydroponic farms - where plants are grown in water rather than soil - aren’t necessarily known for cultivating fruits and vegetables that are any less nutritious than their conventional counterparts. But by increasing the concentration of nutrients, growers can increase the nutritional content of their vegetables. That seems to be the strategy here.

Another aspect of the business Sensei will undoubtedly be marketing is sustainability. Sensei’s hydroponic farms will use roughly 10 percent the amount of water used in traditional farming, and via a partnership with Tesla its farms will be solar powered as well.