Science & technology have always found fertile ground in Japan. From manufacturing to new materials, from transportation to robotics, many of today’s industry-standard owe something to Japanese innovation.

The new startup wave that is coming out from Tokyo promises nothing less.

Mind the Bridge is very happy to announce its partnership with JETRO (Japanese External Trade Organization), born with the scope of supporting the best Japanese startups in US Market Access capacity.

We had our hands full with this project in San Francisco over the last month and are proud to have been able to work with such great entrepreneurs helping them to develop partnerships in the US and better understand the American market.

Below the selected startups, which span from Pre-Seed to Series D funding:

Doreming Co., Ltd. enables workers to tap into their earned wages in real time ”Making Everyday Payday”. Helping smooth cash flows and personal finances for those who either live hand to mouth or might otherwise fall prey to loan sharks. Doreming’s vision is to create a society where working people are happy and motivated by empowering them to gain an access to affordable financial services based on their hard-working history. Doreming was listed in the fintech 100 and selected as a member of Level 39, the world’s leading fintech incubator based in London.
http://www.doreming.com

FiNC Technologies Inc. (FiNC) is a healthtech venture that creates personalized health & wellness solutions, to help users form, maintain and enjoy healthy lifestyle habits. A personal AI trainer within the FiNC app provides recommendations, after analyzing each user’s lifestyle factors, including diet, exercise, sleep and stress. This empowers users to understand and change how daily habits affect their health. FiNC also provides a rich user experience with social, competitive, online-to-offline experiences to drive user engagement.
https://finc.com/

Goiku Battery is an energy management technology company that provides the fastest battery analysis solution in the world. As batteries can encounter many problems during their life-cycle, it is important to know the level of deterioration and to check the actual performances of the batteries. Goiku provides a hardware system that can analyze batteries and battery packs in just 1 second, providing info on lithium-ion as well as nickel-based batteries.
http://goiku.com

Holoash is creating a holographic virtual assistant for all those potentially affected by ADHD. Being always online is exhausting and this recent trend is leading to a rise in depression and stress-related disorders called Digital Dementia (similar to ADHD). The most common solutions sought are therapy and medicine, which are limited in access and are expensive. Holoash wants to provide cheap and fast access to 24/7 round the clock communication to a virtual friend that can assist in everything from personal scheduling and mental issue.
https://holoash.com/


KOANDRO Inc. is a company that designs coffee products and services backed by the vision of “Good coffee to each one of us, delivered our kitchens”. Their products deliver a cup of coffee to each drinker not only with the good quality but also with differently personalized taste to the person’s preference.
https://koandro.com/about/?lang=en

 

Mallservice, Inc. is a software company. Current projects include an entry and seating reservation system, as well as a digital ticket and cashless payment system, both developed using proprietary blockchain technology, which can be used in a self-contained system without the internet, providing an unprecedented level of security for our users.
https://www.mallservice.co.jp

Medmain Inc. is a medtech startup. Medmain is developing the software for pathological image diagnosis, named “PidPort”, using Deep Learning and by collaborating with some medical facilities from all over the world. Through this software, Medmain will provide the accurate and quick pathological diagnosis to anyone who needs it. Every day we strive for better quality of medical treatments to save patients from all unnecessary suffers.
https://medmain.net/


Sitateru Inc. is an online service for clothing production that can respond to requests from both professionals and amateurs. Sitateru helps with all necessary processes involved in clothing production, such as searching for factories, selecting fabric and overall production management. It can manufacture a large variety of products at high-quality in any amount from 30 to 10,000 units. Sitateru staff will provide support from initial consultation to delivery. Even first-time designers or companies can produce their designs without worry.
https://sitateru.co.jp/

COGNITEE Inc. is an artificial intelligence software company based in Tokyo that focuses on context classification. UpSighter is their AI software service for sales training and HR interviews that analyzes real conversations. It assists clients with the quantitative analysis of data, identifying, among others, “high performers,” “good teams” and “productive meetings,” and also provides the auto-feedback system for employees’ training. Cognitee currently has a global team of over 150 people and has received the Graylock award at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference held at San Francisco in 2018.
https://cognitee.com/

EAGLYS has a quantum-resident fast Secure Computing framework as core technology, and develops and provides Secure Computing platform where they securely store, integrate, and analyze with machine-learning and deep-learning the encrypted data. Enterprises can safely and securely utilize big-data among different databases, analyze in detail, and manage high accurate AI models, all without having to worry about security. Eaglys also does R&D on conceptual combination of Secure Computing and AI called Secure AI ™️.
http://eaglys.co.jp/


AISing is a company that sits at the intersection between AI and mechanical engineering. After years of effort, they invented the AI algorithm, “DBT (Deep Binary Tree)”, which can be used for edge devices. AI Sing is in the 3rd year of establishment and has raised about $2 million in funding. Some of its customers include OMRON, DENSO, East Japan Railway Company.
https://aising.jp/

Cinnamon Inc. is a Japan and Vietnam-based Enterprise AI startup which provides an AI document reader to automate the data extraction from unstructured documents in the financial industry. Cinnamon has acquired 50+ paying customers from large Japanese corporations and raised $8M Series B funding in May 2018. Since 2018, it has started the US expansions 2018. They are looking for potential customers to better understand existing needs and feedback on its product. http://cinnamon.is/en/

Eyes Japan provides smart bikes for hipsters featuring environmental sensors to measure live city data such as temperature, humidity, CO, NOX, radiation and so on. Gyrostabilized LEDs on the wheels display location/time-based advertisements all over the city and make this program profitable. The app encourages sharing, dynamic pricing, navigation and shop coupons. Our mission reinvents the business model of shared bike, last-mile mobility, way of sustainability, environmental sensing by citizen science, prevention from bike theft and vandalism.
http://www.nowhere.co.jp

Jeplan recycles clothes (cotton and polyester), cell phones and pet bottles. They collect and recycle used products from consumers, using the raw material that was produced by recycling to manufacture new products. From the collection of used products, transportation, recycling and manufacturing of products using recycled materials, distribution, sales, also, up to the product of the branding, we will build a supply chain with the partners and conduct the operation.
http://www.jeplan.co.jp/en/

MUI Lab has the double meaning of “natural state of mind” in Japanese, and is also the acronym for Material User Interface. In fact, MUI Lab introduces the concept of calm design to the IOT world. It produces a wood interface for residential spaces that people can use to control other smart home services and, in the future, to interact with virtual assistants such as Amazon and Google ones.
https://mui.jp/#en

People want to know a lot about what they watch in a video, for example about the person, place, clothing, and BGM. At PARONYM inc., we are developing video technology that allows people to obtain many types of information from video, just by touching/clicking the screen on your smartphone or PC. Through releasing people from the stress of “video to search” and the digital divide and overcoming language barriers, Paronym aims at providing the next generation video culture that allows people to enjoy their next action. Paronym is also expanding its development towards television, live streaming and signage systems.
https://www.paronym.jp/

Sen corporation is a company that provides the photo service “Hi cheese!”, which is the No. 1 children photo service in Japan. We send professional photographers to events at educational institutions, who then upload the images to our service. Parents and teachers can choose to buy the pictures from an internet connected device anytime, anywhere. We reduce the workload related to the processing, and distribution of images in the education industry, while adding extra value through the high-tech services that we provide.
https://sencorp.co.jp/