Robert I-Chih Chen has an unusual way of changing subjects. First, the machines were testing semiconductors. Then they were sniffing the air for gases and radiation. Now they are minding roots suspended in air, keeping watch over water, nutrients, light and climate. The nouns change. The verbs do not: sense, decide, act, record.
That sequence runs through more than four decades of company building. Chen founded Applied Optoelectronic Technology Corporation, or AOT, in 1981. Hewlett-Packard bought the automatic-test-equipment business in 1991, and Chen became a division general manager. The same year, he and Peter Hsi founded RAE Systems. Its instruments made hazards that people could not see or smell legible to industrial crews, emergency responders and government agencies. Honeywell acquired the company for $340 million in 2013.
A respectable place to stop, one might think. Chen instead founded AEssense, where the invisible thing demanding attention was the root zone. Aeroponics leaves roots hanging without soil and mists them with water and nutrients. Elegant in a diagram, fussy in a building. Pumps, doses, temperatures and schedules must cooperate. Plants are notoriously poor at reading troubleshooting manuals.
01 / The through-lineA pattern disguised as three industries
Chen trained as an electrical engineer at National Cheng Kung University, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and Syracuse University. Before becoming a founder, he held engineering and management jobs at General Motors, General Electric, Tektronix and Fairchild Semiconductor. Later, he joined Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program. The resume looks broad, but the technical instinct underneath it is quite narrow: take a physical process, measure it closely and make the response more reliable.
AOT was the first full expression of that instinct. The company designed and manufactured automatic test equipment for semiconductor makers, a business where errors hide at tiny scales and production cannot depend on patient human inspection. When HP acquired AOT in January 1991, it kept the operation in Milpitas and folded it into a much larger instrument company. Chen remained through 1993 as division general manager. He had seen both sides of the founder’s favorite door: building an independent operation, then walking it into an incumbent with deeper resources and thicker procedures.
AOT automated tests for semiconductor manufacturing. RAE compressed environmental sensing into portable instruments, then connected those instruments into wireless networks. Its AreaRAE system could send chemical readings to a base station and give operators a changing picture of an incident. The company’s language was “pervasive sensing,” a phrase that sounds grand until you remember its practical meaning: put useful attention where a person cannot continuously stand.
RAE’s product history shows the loop getting more sensitive and more connected. In 1999, the company introduced photoionization detectors able to read parts per billion rather than parts per million. In 2002, AreaRAE linked chemical sensors wirelessly to a base station up to two miles away and added internet control; GPS later gave operators location alongside the readings. The instrument was no longer merely announcing a number. It was becoming a node in a shared operational picture.
That distinction matters. A sensor by itself can tell you something happened. A network can tell a team where it happened, how the conditions are changing and which response belongs where. RAE equipment was deployed at large public events and in industrial incidents, including a sulfuric-acid spill at a Texas dock. The glamour level of a gas detector is low. Its usefulness rises precisely when everyone would rather it be boring.
“We think we can make a contribution, make a difference, in this area.”Robert Chen, on technology’s growing role in farming
RAE’s growth also made Chen an international operator. The company established manufacturing in Shanghai in the 1990s and built customers across industrial, public-safety and government markets. By the time Honeywell completed the acquisition, RAE equipment was used in more than 120 countries. Chen had spent 22 years leading a company where reliability was not a slide-deck virtue. The detector had to detect.
02 / The instrument panelWhen a grow recipe becomes software
AEssenseGrows applies the same appetite for instrumentation to cultivation. Its AEtrium equipment holds plants above enclosed root chambers. Sensors and mechanical controls manage variables around water, nutrients and the grow environment. Guardian Grow Manager gives the operator a software layer for monitoring, data logging, remote access and “recipes” that can be executed again.
Recipe is the revealing word. It belongs equally to kitchens, factories and code. It implies inputs, timing, sequence and an expected result. It also implies memory. When a particular combination works, the settings need not vanish into one grower’s notebook or recollection. They can be stored, compared and revised.
Guardian also makes distance part of the design. Operators can review conditions remotely, log performance and respond when measurements leave the intended range. That does not make the farm effortless. It makes deviations visible before the next walk through the room, and it leaves a record richer than “something looked off on Tuesday.”
The Chen loop · one operating idea, three industries
The point is not a farm without people. The point is a farm where human judgment can be expressed as a system, watched continuously and corrected quickly. Chen has described the company as combining hardware, software and plant science “repeatedly and consistently.” The phrasing is almost stubborn. Nature keeps moving; the operator keeps measuring.
This is where Chen’s industrial past matters. Software founders can treat hardware as a difficult accessory. Agricultural founders can treat software as a dashboard. AEssense has to make the two answer to each other. A pump’s behavior changes the data. The data changes the next command. The plant supplies the final review, silently and on its own schedule.
03 / The company travelsPeople carry the architecture, too
Several AEssense leaders also worked at RAE Systems. Executive vice president Jennifer Ong led strategic programs in RAE’s CEO office. Wenpeng Hsueh, AEssense’s vice president of quality, reliability and service, previously led engineering work on RAE products. Sales executive Christopher Wrenn helped RAE grow across hazardous-material and industrial-safety markets. Michael Holden Jorgensen built RAE’s European headquarters and international offices before taking responsibility for AEssense activities across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
This is a quieter kind of founder advantage. A new company does not begin only with patents, funding or a market thesis. It can begin with colleagues who already share a definition of reliability. Chen’s third company imported some of the social machinery of his second: people accustomed to building equipment, supporting it across borders and explaining technical systems to operators whose work continues after the sales meeting ends.
04 / Ambition meets arithmeticThe farm still has to earn its floor space
Chen’s public ambition has expanded beyond a piece of equipment. He has written about modular controlled-environment farms as one component of a response to food security and global hunger, paired with reliable low-cost power. In 2022, AEssense launched AEssenseFresh to extend its systems and educational material toward fresh-food growers. The company has also sold into cannabis cultivation, where high-value plants and strict process requirements made automation an early commercial fit.
He is not blind to the economics. In a LinkedIn post, Chen pointed to the failures of vertical farms focused narrowly on leafy greens and argued for differentiated crops and broad-spectrum cultivation. It is an engineer’s version of humility: the machine may work exactly as designed while the business around it does not.
Controlled agriculture offers a wonderfully tidy illustration - stack the plants, recycle the water, tune the light, harvest near the customer. Reality sends invoices. Electricity, labor, maintenance, construction and crop prices remain unimpressed by futuristic renderings. Chen’s answer is versatility and automation: make the equipment modular, make the recipes portable, lower the labor burden and let one platform support more than one crop. Whether that arithmetic works is decided site by site, harvest by harvest.
AEssense announced a Series B round led by Hambrecht Ventures in 2022. The company’s public record since then shows deployments, partnerships, educational projects and a fresh-food expansion rather than a founder performing celebrity. Chen’s LinkedIn activity is similarly focused on systems, collaborators, energy and the long problem of feeding more people. He posts like an operator who would prefer the diagram to lead somewhere.
05 / The third actAttention, bottled and shipped
The pleasing symmetry in Chen’s career is that every chapter begins with something hard to see. A semiconductor defect. A trace gas. A root’s changing needs. Each can become expensive when noticed late. Each rewards an instrument that catches the signal early and a system that knows what to do next.
There is also a useful founder lesson here. Expertise need not be a prison made from one industry’s vocabulary. Chen’s durable expertise is not simply gas detection or aeroponics. It is the construction of feedback loops in places where software meets matter. That pattern survived an acquisition by HP, a public-company journey, a $340 million sale to Honeywell and a leap into agriculture.
At an indoor farm, the loop becomes almost theatrical. Roots dangle in a chamber. Nutrient mist arrives on cue. Sensors report. Guardian watches. Somewhere, a grower studies the screen and decides whether the recipe deserves another run. The plants say nothing. The system pays attention anyway.