Chloros Announces the Birth of "Dream Rice" - The Future of New Variety Development Transformed by Image Analysis AI

Our company endorses April Dream, an initiative to make April 1st a day for sharing dreams. This press release is the dream of Chloros Inc.

In the future, a "dream rice" will be developed that is resistant to climate change and diseases, and achieves both high yield and quality.

Behind this is the evolution of crop evaluation by image analysis AI.

Our dream is to support the evolution of crops with the power of image analysis AI and contribute to solving the world's food problems. Chloros Inc. will contribute to the efficiency and advancement of variety development through technology that quantitatively evaluates crop growth and diseases from images.

Background: Worsening Food Shortages

The current world population of about 8.1 billion is projected to increase to about 9.7 to 10 billion by 2050, and global food demand in 2050 is predicted to reach about 1.7 times that of 2010. However, most of the world's prime agricultural land has already been developed, and it is said that about 80% of future food production increases must be achieved by improving productivity on existing farmland, not by expanding it. Achieving this goal is not easy, especially as crop damage from droughts and floods due to climate change becomes more severe.

Chloros's Focus

Innovations in variety improvement, pesticides, and fertilizers are essential for improving agricultural productivity. Meanwhile, for example, it has generally taken nearly 10 years to develop a new rice variety. Promising lines have been selected by visually evaluating the occurrence of diseases and differences in growth one by one.

However, with the need to respond to unprecedented environmental conditions due to climate change, variety development requires even greater speed and precision than before.

We at Chloros are tackling these challenges with an approach of image analysis AI.

From images taken with drones or smartphones, AI captures differences in growth and the occurrence of pests and diseases on a 1cm scale and automatically quantifies them. By capturing visual crop evaluation as quantitative data, we achieve improved efficiency and reproducibility in the selection process.

In the future, this technology will shorten the 10-year variety development process to 5 years.

And the "dream rice," resistant to climate change and realizing high quality and stable yields, will reach producers and consumers sooner.

We are serious about making such a future a reality.

Path to Commercialization

In 2025, we will deploy a crop analysis AI solution for field trials, mainly for pesticide/seed manufacturers and public experimental research institutions. As of March 2026, it has been introduced at five domestic and international pesticide/seed manufacturers and two public experimental research institutions, and is being used in field trials such as variety evaluation tests and efficacy tests both in Japan and overseas.

SWALO Refresh ― Crop Image Analysis Platform
In 2026, we refreshed our new service "SWALO," a platform that completes everything from shooting to AI inference, aggregation, and mapping within the customer's environment. By providing pre-trained AI models, we have created an environment that can be introduced in a short period of time without specialized knowledge.