AQAS

AQAS Corporation is a Kyoto University-based venture that developed from a highly-rated AMED project focused on separation technology. The company was established on March 13, 2023, by Kenichi Hibino and Hiroaki Asaoka. The impetus for the company's founding arose from a project to improve the component analysis of medicinal carrots, which revealed a lack of high-performance separation columns specifically for crude drugs. This led to the development of their core product.

The company's main offering is the "AqasPrime®" capillary column for liquid chromatography, designed for the high-precision separation of hundreds of trace components found in plants, trees, algae, and bacteria simultaneously. This technology enables the non-targeted visualization of previously unanalyzed plant components. AQAS operates a business-to-business model, providing research tools and a platform business to clients in the pharmaceutical, functional food, cosmetics, and seed industries. The business generates revenue through the sale of its AqasPrime® columns and systems. Recently, the company completed its Series A, 1st round of funding, which will be used to strengthen the AqasPrime® product line and develop complementary AI tools to build extensive component data libraries.

Keywords: liquid chromatography, capillary columns, separation technology, component analysis, plant-based compounds, trace component separation, analytical chemistry, research tools, pharmaceutical research, functional foods, cosmetics ingredients, seed analysis, metabolomics, natural product chemistry, Kyoto University venture