About the founder

Kentaro Kitahara

Representative Director and CEO

He started writing programs in N-88 BASIC in junior high school. After several years at system development companies in Sapporo, he set up on his own in 2008 as “Jōhō Kōmuten Kentalogic” (a “jōhō kōmuten” is a hands-on software builder, like a local building contractor), and in 2017 incorporated the business as BREAKTHROUGH.

In custom development, he has mostly joined development teams as a subcontractor and handled work such as:

• Developing map data features for car navigation systems
• Embedded development close to the OS for a mobile phone manufacturer: two feature phones and two smartphones
• A display engine for smartphone apps on multiple operating systems, from design through maintenance, for more than four years
• Lead developer, on our own, for nearly nine years, of a payroll system that cannot stop, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

At a time when he wanted to create something of lasting value rather than only earn money as a hired hand, a meeting with people in forestry led him to organize a forestry-themed ideathon and hackathon himself in 2015. To take the results beyond an event and into the field, he joined a forestry recruitment program in Hokkaido, tried planting and pruning himself, and kept building prototypes while listening to forestry workers. But the communication device he built reached only a few dozen meters inside the forest.

To find out why, he entered the Graduate School of Kagoshima University after turning 40 while running the company, and studied radio attenuation in forests. Based on that research, he stopped using his own devices and switched to JVCKENWOOD's digital two-way radios; the result is today's Soko-co Forest. After completing his master's degree, he moved to Kagoshima. In the 2026 academic year, he is a part-time lecturer at the same university, teaching the use of AI in smart agriculture, forestry and fisheries.

Languages and technologies

Mobile

Kotlin, Java (Android), Swift/SwiftUI, Flutter/Dart, React Native, Objective-C, Tizen, etc.* He is especially strong at the layer that connects native code with the app (JNI, etc.).

Web

TypeScript, React/Next.js, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, etc.

Server and business systems

Go, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, SQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL), VBA, etc.

Embedded

C/C++ (NDK/JNI), etc.

Device integration

Sensor devices, smartwatches, Bluetooth (BLE), professional digital two-way radios, low-power wireless communication (LPWA), high-precision positioning, etc.* Connecting devices with smartphones and servers is his strength, and the field he enjoys most.

AI

AI agents (RAG, MCP server development), image recognition (YOLO, TensorFlow Lite, ONNX Runtime), offline speech recognition, LLMs (OpenAI API and others, as well as self-hosted models), OCR (Google Cloud Vision), etc.

Cloud and infrastructure

AWS, Google Cloud/Firebase, Docker, GitHub Actions, etc.

These are the main ones. For more than 30 years he has written code in whatever languages and environments each project required, so he can usually handle ones not listed here as well.