Woven City adds seven inventors and starts building its second phase

Woven City adds seven inventors and starts building its second phase

25 September 2026: One year after Woven City opened in Susono, Shizuoka, Toyota's test town has about 30 resident-centred proof-of-concept trials running, about 160 residents it calls Weavers living in roughly 80 households, and 31 companies in its inventor programme after seven joined. Construction of the second phase began in September 2026.

Not yet independently verified. The benchmark results for the Woven City AI Vision Engine come from Toyota's internal testing. No investment figure is given. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Seven more inventors

Woven City launched officially on 25 September 2025. The seven new inventors take the total to 31. Three of the seven are Chubu Electric Power Miraiz, working on demand response, Daihatsu, on microgrid mobility and energy, and Hitachi Construction Machinery, on future construction sites.

The Woven City Challenge produced four winners: Aerial Base for drone logistics using dedicated delivery boxes, Aillis for AI medical devices, JOYCLE for a box that turns waste into resources on site without transport or incineration, and NationX for an AI decision platform that combines resident and facility data. NationX replaced PUBLIC Technologies as a finalist. Daihatsu's theme is a microgrid-enabled platform for mobility and energy, and Chubu Electric Power Miraiz, which sells electricity and gas, will work on accessible demand response services.

Phase 2 doubles the residents

Phase 1 covers about 47,000 square metres and was completed in October 2024, with room for about 300 residents. Phase 2 covers about 52,000 square metres for about 600 residents. Site preparation for it is complete, construction began in September 2026, and completion is scheduled for the end of November 2028. The town is planned to reach about 2,000 residents eventually, at 1117 Mishuku, Susono.

The Weavers include residents of Susono and nearby municipalities. Inventors run the trials, collect Weaver feedback and improve them through continuous improvement, which Toyota calls Kaizen.

Safety systems and robots at home

Toyota is testing its integrated ANZEN System. Under a partnership with Shizuoka Prefecture, the devices will go into prefectural government vehicles within fiscal 2026.

The AI Robot Association, AIRoA, has placed household robots in 11 households, and as of 24 September 2026 more than 1,000 tasks had been tested. Toyota plans to release version 2.0 of its Woven City AI Vision Engine by the end of 2026. The current version is used in the ANZEN System and in a coffee study, and recorded a leading score on one vision-language benchmark. Version 2.0 is designed to describe real-world events in natural language, explain why they happened and detect specific behaviours by people and mobility technologies in video. Toyota reports leading scores on more than 10 benchmarks, including reasoning benchmarks, from internal testing against the MVBench, CaST-Bench and GroundingME standards.

A coffee lounge as a research site

UCC Japan runs the coffee lounge in Woven City. It developed a method to graph more than 300 behavioural data points from trial participants, and will use it to study how different types of coffee affect concentration.

Opening the gates

Visitor reservations for the Japanese public opened on 1 October 2026. Recruitment of Shizuoka residents drew over 1,000 applications, and about 25 households are due to move in around March 2027.

Woven by Toyota runs the project, with offices in Tokyo and Susono, and Toyota Motor Corporation is the parent.

Related on TrustList:

• FANUC and Hitachi team up to put learning robots into real production

Sources

• Woven by Toyota: Woven City first anniversary update, 25 September 2026