Vision/Mission
Vision: Contribute to creating the future of which every human be more humane, richer and brighter.
Mission: Realize the research environment where human can devote oneself to creative work to accelerate life science.
Business Description
RBI is located in Tokyo, Japan, to develop the technology platform to serve biological research experimentation by using the dual-arm humanoid robot. This robotic system will be integrated into the cloud system for data management and internet access globally.
Background
RBI was established in June, 2016, by Dr Natsume and Mr Takagi and was soon appointed by AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science Technology) as a startup venture. The current shareholders are Yaskawa Electric Company, JST (Japan Science and Technology, the governmental institute), in addition to the founders. The development of the product started several years ago as a joint project between Yaskawa Electric and AIST, in which Yaskawa provides the robot technology and AIST provides the biological experiment requirements of the robotic system. RBI will add the software and AI technology on top of this robot technology and biological experiment expertise. This combination of expertise is very unique in developing new solutions for not only for improving the quality of biology research and drug discovery, but also laboratory management and preventing misconduct in data handling.
Products/Services
The product is a robotic biology system by which the humanoid robot operates the experiment using the protocol maker (software) written in semantic language on PC by the researcher.
It will be connected to the internet and integrated into the global data system via the internet cloud system.
RBI also runs the RBC (Robotic Biology Center) where numerous robotic systems run by remote access. It is mainly for the contract analysis business.
Markets
The main targets are pharmaceutical companies, research organizations, academia and CRO.
The system provides very high quality data with very high reproducibility, and the data is automatically recorded in a standardized digital format. The protocols are standardized which may help with the AI introduction in the biological research area.
Industry
The industry may be categorized as the biology research support industry, but its uniqueness lies in it eliminating the human factor by using the humanoid robots. It is also quite advanced in the software development for robot manipulation.
Location
Tokyo Japan now, but in future we will establish RBC in the USA, Europe and in Asia.
Competitive Advantages
Robot technology, software development and wet biology experiment capabilities that are well combined in the system design and operation. None of the potential companies have such a set of expertise in this area yet.
Financial Projection
We will have at least 40-60 systems per year for the sales in 3-4 years in Japan, while the global market size is about at least 10 times bigger. We also have RBC’s operations for the contract analysis business as potential for growth.
Company Goals & Objectives
The goal is that the cloud system connects a number of robotic systems on global sites and the RBC facilities to accumulate big data for data services. The system becomes the de facto standard in the industry and academic areas to provide reliable and reproducible data.
Management
Very strong management team:
CSO Dr Natsume, PhD, Protein Scientist
CIO Dr Takahashi, PhD, AI expert from RIKEN
CTO Mr Murai, Robot Engineer from Yaskawa Electric Company
