Picture this: You're driving along the highway on the island of Lanai, Hawaii's smallest inhabited island. All of a sudden, the verdant landscape gives way to futuristic greenhouses powered by an array of solar panels.
This is the first outpost of Larry Ellison's 3-year-old indoor farming company, Sensei Ag.
Sensei Ag is an agriculture-tech firm bent on changing the way food is grown worldwide. The company's mission is to feed the world by making produce more nutrient-rich and accessible and lowering the barrier to entry for vertical or greenhouse farming.
And while the company is young, it has the backing of Ellison, the tech titan whose net worth hovers around $95 billion and whose aggressive bet on the future of database-management turned Oracle into a $200 billion behemoth.
Ellison's latest venture seems to have an equally ambitious outlook on the future.
"In the next three-to-five years, our goal is to feed the top three quintiles of the world with our products and employ the bottom two," Sensei Ag CEO Sonia Lo told Insider. "And then in the next eight-to-10 years, it is to feed everybody."
Here's how Sensei Ag is working to making indoor farming mainstream and use its Hawaiian homebase as a "lab for the world."