Who founded the company that became Toyota Industries?

Sakichi Toyoda founded the company that became Toyota Industries.

Toyoda established Toyoda Automatic Loom Works on November 18, 1926. The company grew from his inventions in textile machinery, especially the Toyoda Automatic Loom, Type G, which could stop automatically when a problem occurred. That principle later influenced Toyota’s manufacturing philosophy.

The business became the industrial foundation of the Toyota Group. In 1933, Sakichi’s son Kiichiro Toyoda led the creation of an automobile department within the loom company. That department was spun off as Toyota Motor Company in 1937, while the original enterprise continued as Toyota Industries.

Kiichiro Toyoda is therefore associated with founding Toyota Motor Corporation, not with founding Toyota Industries itself. Eiji Toyoda later became a major Toyota Motor executive, and Taiichi Ohno helped develop the Toyota Production System. Those distinctions make Sakichi the canonical answer to this question.