OPTiM Pinpoint Timed Spraying Drone AX Service

OPTiM Corporation is a Japanese software and AI company led by president Shunji Sugaya that runs 'AX' businesses in agriculture, construction, medical and office IT. In agriculture it develops drone-based pinpoint spraying, seeding and field survey services aimed at cutting labour for growers and cooperatives.

The Drone Pesticide Spraying AX Service, also called the Pinpoint Timed Spraying Service, digitizes the whole collective pest-control workflow: paper field maps are converted into digital maps, orders are collected by OCR or a smartphone web form, AI proposes spraying dates from transplanting dates, crop condition and weather forecasts, and AI assigns pilots and optimizes flight plans with real-time progress tracking. Flight logs act as digital spraying records and the system issues invoices per grower. Clients are pest-control groups, JA agricultural cooperatives and municipal offices, mainly for rice.

• Digital field maps: paper or outdated maps are converted into editable digital maps.
• Order intake: mark-sheet OCR or smartphone web forms collect spraying orders.
• AI spraying calendar: optimal dates are proposed from transplanting dates, crop quality and forecasts.
• AI flight and pilot planning: pilot assignment and flight plans are optimized with live progress tracking.
• Digital records and billing: flight logs are tallied per grower and invoices are generated.
• Related services: drone seeding, shading-agent spraying, field survey support and pilot dispatch.

• Agricultural cooperatives in the Mekong Delta coordinating drone spraying across many small rice plots with one digital map and billing system.
• Provincial agriculture departments planning region-wide pest-control campaigns with AI-timed spraying.
• Drone spraying service companies managing pilot schedules, orders and proof-of-application records.

• Proven scale: about 32,000 ha and 130,000 rice fields across 25 prefectures were treated in FY2025.
• AI-recommended spraying timing based on transplanting dates and weather aims to improve pest-control effect.
• Cooperatives and municipal staff are freed from paper orders, map updates, scheduling and billing.
• Growers do not need to attend spraying, since flight logs serve as digital proof of application.

Ageing farmers and shrinking rural labour are pushing rice-growing regions to move collective pest control from manned helicopters and ground sprayers to drones. The bottleneck is shifting from aircraft to operations: scheduling pilots, managing thousands of small plots and billing growers, which creates demand for software-led spraying services that Southeast Asian rice economies also face.

OPTiM Corporation was founded in 2000 and is led by president Shunji Sugaya. It claims the No.1 domestic share in drone spraying (own survey, January 2025) and holds patents including JP7625338 on a drone-mounted discharge device. It also resells spraying drones from NTT e-Drone Technology, DJI and XAG, and runs R&D on pinpoint fertilizer spraying in Niigata and drone seeding with AI analysis in Ishikawa.