Top Artificial Intelligence Startups in Japan

Moloco was founded in 2013 by a team of machine learning and software engineers with expertise from Google, Oracle, Twitter, and Facebook. With its headquarters in Redwood City, California, Moloco has 15 offices across the US, UK, Korea, China, Japan, India, Europe, and Singapore.

Our mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language. Learning a language can change a life by opening doors to new cultures, careers, and communities. Two billion people around the world are actively trying to learn a language, but the best way to learn (one-on-one tutoring) is hard to access at scale and hasn’t been meaningfully improved in decades. Speak is building a human-level, AI-powered tutor in your pocket: a conversation-first experience that lets learners actually speak, get instant feedback, and progress through carefully designed lessons. The result is a complete path from beginner to confident speaker across multiple languages. Speak first launched in South Korea in 2019, where Speak has now become the number one language learning app, and we now serve learners across many markets and 15+ languages. Speak is one of the world’s leading AI companies, with over $150m raised in venture investment from OpenAI, Accel, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and more, with a distributed team across San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana.

The architectures that power modern AI were designed for language, not for science. They were never built to understand DNA, interpret experiments, or learn the rules that govern living systems. Closing this gap represents one of the defining opportunities of our time. Our team has pioneered advances across frontier AI, including the first models trained with one-million-token context windows, and now scaling toward one billion. We focus on innovations on systems and architecture, because building AI for science demands a fundamentally different foundation. As a first application of this technology engine, we are advancing AI for life, the most complex and consequential domain of all. We are the AI team behind Evo and Evo 2, the generative genomics models used to create real gene-editing tools and the first whole genomes designed entirely by AI. That work demonstrated that AI can create biology, not just analyze it. We are now building multimodal models trained directly on the fabric of biology, enabling faster discovery, deeper understanding, and entirely new capabilities. As we push the frontier of scientific world models, we will build systems hand-in-hand to ensure global biological resilience: rapid detection, rapid response, and rapid countermeasures against emerging threats, both natural and synthetic. Our mission is ambitious: to reimagine what AI can do for science, and to build that future.

We are reinvent caregiving by developing An Autonomous Care System. Voxela AI detects incidents such as falls, waking up from bed/wheelchair, wandering and makes it actionable by creating alerts to caregivers. Our product is intended for care-team in hospitals, senior care facility, assisted living care and also skilled nursing homes. The solution brings observability and visibility at caregivers finger tips. It reduces incident response time, provide in-depth insight about the incident, turns the incident footage to actionable insight and decreases the ER/hospitalization cost for facilities.

The company runs on a simple philosophy - Growth for Everyone. This extends to every stakeholder of our organization, and also extends to the innovations front. We are committed to constant and consistent innovation, staying at the front of new technologies. Coupled with strong business models and technological solutions, this dedication to growth and innovation ensures that all players in the ecosystem benefit and thrive.

Welocalize is a company that provides services to transform content into multiple languages. We have a network of over 250,000 linguistic resources and operate in North America, Europe, and Asia. We offer high-quality training data solutions for machine learning by combining technology and human intelligence to collect, annotate, and evaluate all types of content.

Viewlocked is an AI-powered travel planning and booking marketplace connecting travelers with verified local partners across stays, experiences, guides, tours, rentals, transportation, and local services, all in one place. We built Viewlocked to solve a simple problem: planning a trip today means juggling a dozen different platforms just to book a hotel, find a tour, rent a scooter, and hire a local guide. Nothing talks to each other, and by the time travelers discover the best local experiences, they're often already locked into their plans. Our AI assistant, VLX, changes that. Travelers build their trip, and VLX surfaces relevant partners in real time based on their dates, destination, and preferences, letting them discover and book everything directly within their itinerary before they even arrive. We officially launched in June 2026 and have already onboarded 60+ verified partners across 15+ countries, with zero paid marketing spend. We've been featured in Travel Daily News International and Travel and Tour World, and we're actively building a global network of travel partners as we scale. For travelers, Viewlocked means one platform for the entire trip. For partners, it means visibility at the exact moment traveler intent is highest, with structured bookings and a simple, transparent commission model. We're a small, fast-moving founding team building something we believe travel has been missing for a long time. If you're passionate about travel, startups, or building at an early stage.

IrukaDark is a super sub-AI built for the little tasks that cling to everyday PC work. Copy-paste, reading articles and docs, meeting notes, daily reports, task management, all handled at blazing speed with a single shortcut key. It wipes out the small hassles that steal your time and focus, then delivers a dramatically smarter way to work.