Shunichiro Kuroki

Bio:

Shunichiro Kuroki is Founder and CEO of ScentifAI, Inc. (formerly Aroma Bit, Inc.), a Tokyo-based deep-tech company building an Ambient AI platform on its own chemical imaging sensor hardware. ScentifAI's mission, "Naturalizing AI through Digital Olfaction," is to give machines the sense they still lack: the ability to perceive the chemical world around them as structured, learnable data.

Kuroki's career runs from silicon to capital markets and intellectual properties. He received a BA in Chemistry and Physics from Macalester College and began his career as a semiconductor process engineer at NEC Corporation (now Renesas Electronics). He then spent more than a decade as a technology-sector investment analyst at top-tier investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, followed by invention development and investment fund, before returning to hardware as a founder.

In 2014 he founded Aroma Bit to digitize smell. Under his leadership the company progressed from multi-array QCM odor sensors built on proprietary receptor-membrane materials to silicon CMOS odor imaging sensors, launching a CMOS sensor module development kit in 2021 and building odor datasets with R&D teams across food and beverage, consumer products, automotive and environmental applications.

Following a strategic pivot in 2025, the company relaunched as ScentifAI in 2026 with a sharper focus: chemical sensing as a data infrastructure for AI. ScentifAI's core technology is an ultra-compact, 1.2 mm CMOS chemical ambient imaging sensor that converts the surrounding chemical environment into high-resolution image data, producing molecular "fingerprints" of roughly 57,000 pixels. Because chemistry arrives as pixels, smell can be processed with the same vision-style AI toolchains used for cameras.

Kuroki leads the company's end-to-end system architecture, which unifies the sensor, edge inference and a cloud data-lake layer under a single spatio-temporal data model, so that chemical data can be fused with vision, audio, environmental and human-context signals for cross-modal learning.

Sensor development is carried out in collaboration with Toyohashi University of Technology and ScentifAI's development base in Numazu, Shizuoka, Japan.

The technology is being evaluated in proof-of-concept projects with global technology companies, including anomaly detection for AI data centers, and explored for in-cabin chemical monitoring in autonomous vehicles, wearables, smart-home devices, robotics and food and beverage quality.

A central theme of Kuroki's work is chemical data at scale: treating deployed sensors as a data-acquisition infrastructure that produces labeled, cross-modal chemical datasets for ambient and physical AI, in effect a data factory for the sense of smell.

He is an outspoken advocate for olfaction as a necessary modality for robots and Physical AI systems.

Kuroki is an inventor or co-inventor on more than ten patents in odor sensing, optical display systems and related technologies. He has presented on digital olfaction at international technology conferences including IDTechEx Show! Europe, and Aroma Bit was selected for the STARTUP AUTOBAHN open innovation platform in Stuttgart, Germany. ScentifAI is currently a shortlisted candidate for a leading global semiconductor startup accelerator program.

At Sensors Converge, Kuroki shares practical engineering lessons on designing, calibrating and deploying chemical imaging sensors, and on structuring chemical data so it can be fused with other sensing modalities at scale.