Its goal was to create a modern farm to feed the world, but despite $500 million in funding it just feeds part of an island

Due to a lack of farming expertise, Sensei spent millions building its greenhouses.

Larry Ellison wanted his techno-savvy farm, Sensei Ag, to feed millions -- even in hard-to-farm places like Africa. But eight years and more than half a billion dollars later, the venture has failed to grow its Hawaiian greenhouses into a model that would modernize agricultural practices, reports Tom Dotan of The Wall Street Journal.

The cutting-edge technology Sensei boasts is rarely used, and the company has been "beset by problems typical to tech startups, including executive changeovers, shifting goals, and bad Wi-Fi," Dotan explains. Sensei leadership's lack of agricultural expertise has been costly and caused delays. "Some of its top executives are tech veterans who have no commercial agricultural experience."

Ellison, who is co-founder of software giant Oracle, has "called the project, and the island more broadly, part of a grand experiment in sustainability," Dotan writes. "Far from feeding the world, its crops of lettuce and cherry tomatoes are only enough to supply the few groceries and restaurants on the island of Lanai and [other] spots around Hawaii."

Even though Sensei has plenty of funding and technology expertise, the concept struggled to gain momentum. "Employees said Ellison vacillated on which crops to grow," Dotan explains. "One early idea was to repair the land by growing crops with minerals that would fertilize the soil— for example, by growing cabbages and feeding them to goats to make fertilizer. That idea was abandoned for cost."

Sensei set lofty targets, but its leadership failed to consult Hawaiian farmers or agriculture experts, which cost the company millions of dollars and stalled development. "Ellison hired an Israeli firm to build the greenhouses, and although Israel is considered a leader in greenhouses, the structures were designed for that country’s desert climate and weren’t built to handle Lanai’s high humidity or gusts of up to 80 mile-per-hour winds," Dotan reports. "Ellison said the structures would cost $12 million, but they ended up costing closer to $50 million."

Given its lack of success, "Sensei has moved away from its original mission to feed the world," Dotan adds. The company has restructured its goal to support farming with state-of-the-art software.