Founders
Noriyuki Kojima, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, CEO
Noriyuki Kojima holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
He specializes in natural language processing and computer vision, with a particular focus on large language models. He was the co-founder and the initial driving force of the LLM Fugaku (the 2nd fastest supercomputer at the time) project, now a cross-institution effort across Japanese universities and companies. He has work experiences at Facebook and Hugging Face, a leading company in open-sourcing AI models and data infrastructure.
He received the Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2022, the top conference in AI. He is a recipient of the Masayoshi Son Scholarship.
Prof. Jungo Kasai
Co-Founder, CTO
Jungo Kasai is a Research Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.
He is a leading expert in natural language processing (already ranked among the top-40 most cited Japanese NLP researchers at the young age of 29), with numerous papers accepted at top-tier international conferences. With internship experiences at Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and the Allen Institute for AI, he has a deep understanding of the processes and elements required for AI to be used in real-world applications. He received the Best Paper Award at NAACL 2022.
He is an IBM Ph.D. Fellow and a recipient of the Masayoshi Son Scholarship and the Funai Overseas Scholarship.
Advisors
Shigeki Saitoh
Advisor – Business and Strategy
Shigeki “Tommy” Saitoh is a leading venture capitalist in Japan with over 15 years of investment experience, specializing in technology investments and cross-
border business development for portfolio companies. Tommy also served as the head of the global business division of the JVCA (Japan Venture Capital Association) through 2016-2019. Before his VC career, he had been an internet entrepreneur at Netscape, Digital Garage, etc. with a few IPO track records.
Tommy received a BA in Economics from the University of Tokyo, and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in High-tech Venture Management.
Justin Turkat
Advisor – SIP Director
He holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
With experience as CEO, strategic investor, and operating partner, Justin Turkat possesses extensive practical experience in the United States, Europe, and Asia. As a director, he led the correction of the company's capital policy, particularly for the motion design platform Fable, which operates on web browsers. In subsequent follow-on rounds, he worked diligently to attract co-investors, including top U.S. venture capitalists such as Collaborative, Redpoint, and Chad Hurley, one of the founders and former CEO of YouTube. Previously, he served as the CIO of Nihonki Corporation, supporting the initial investment and business of the Japanese venture iSpace, which aimed to land on the moon. At Kotoba Technolgoies, he leads incubation efforts and is scheduled to assume a director position after investment.