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Japanese startup Cinnamon, developing a document reading engine and a voice recognition solution leveraging their proprietary AI technologies, announced it has closed a series B round. The total amount of funding in this round has reached about 1.5 billion yen (about $13.7 million). In addition to the investors revealed in the previous announcement, Mirai Creation Fund, Nomura Holdings, Sumitomo Corporation, SMBC Venture Capital (SMBC-VC), Sachio Semmoto (Co-founder of KDDI), Fujiyo Ishiguro (President of Netyear Group) participated in this round. All the investments including the one from SMBC-VC intend strategic partnerships.

Flax Scanner, the RPA (robotics process automation) class 2 solution using the company’s own document reading engine Cinnamon AI, is widely used for handling documents such as contracts, resumes, sales progress reports, medical charts, handwritten application forms, real estate property information, receipts, etc. Rossa Voice, another flagship product from the company, is a voice dictation solution based on an automated word correction technology used for Flax Scanner.

Among all the investors revealed at this time, it appears that Nomura Holdings will use Rossa Voice to streamline the call center operations at their brokerage services. Aiming to improve their service quality and prevent possible defects, many brokerage firms record phone interactions between their agents and customers regarding deals. However, it would be impossible for humans to monitor in real-time or review all records. Rossa Voice can make these processes more efficient and labor-saving.

Through cooperation with Cinnamon, Sumitomo Corporatation aims to strengthen their Digital Transformation effort in the entire company. SMBC-VC, the investment arm of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, aims to improve the efficiency of the group’s financial subsidiaries including Sumitomo Mitsui Bank while Mirai Creation Fund (operated by Sparx Group, funded by Toyota Motor and Mitsui Sumitomo Bank) expects contribution to streamlining operations at Toyota.

With the latest funding, Cinnamon will be more focused on global expansion. In addition to AI development centers in Vietnam and Taiwan, the Tokyo-based startup will set up an office in the San Francisco Bay Area to expand into the US market. Since Rossa Voice has succeeded in attracting US companies through introduction at InsureTech conferences there, they have made up their mind to expand into the US which has higher demand than other markets.

In addition, the company announced it will appoint Takeshi Niinami, President of Suntory Holdings, as an advisor as of February 1st. With the help of Niinami who has demonstrated leadership at Japanese renowned companies like Mitsubishi Corporation and convenience store giant Lawson, Cinnamon expects to strengthen the structure of their team which is rapidly expanding. Going forward, the company plans to strengthen hiring representatives for business development, delivering AI solutions, and senior AI researchers.

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Japanese startup Cinnamon, developing a document reading engine for “white collar” businesses, announced today that it has secured 800 million yen (about $7.4 million) in a series B round funding and 100 million yen (about $926,000) in loans. The latest round is led by SBI Investment with participation from FFG Venture Business Partners, Itochu Techno-Solutions, Sony Innovation Fund and TIS. Loans were secured from Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Bank this time.

The latest round follows the previous funding from multiple institutional and individual investors back in January this year (the announcement was made in February). The sum of funding in the previous round has not been disclosed but Cinnamon revealed that it was part of a series A round in an interview with The Bridge. When Cinnamon changed its business model from developing photo-sharing apps to an AI (artificial intelligence) solution provider, their incorporated entity was also changed over from a Singaporean company into a Japanese one. Combined with the sum raised by the previous entity, this round saw Cinnamon having raised a total of over 1 billion yen (about $9.2 million) to date.

The company will use the funds to strengthen hiring and fostering AI engineers, expanding sales channels, solidifying team structure and develop new products. The company is managing, developing business and sell products based on five offices in Asia – Tokyo, Hanoi (Vietnam), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Taipei (Taiwan) and Singapore. Among all of them, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Taipei locations have “AI Lab” functions to foster engineers and develop technologies with an aim to employ 500 AI engineers by 2022.

The company’s main focus is the RPA (robotics process automation) class 2 solution Flax Scanner, which uses the document reading engine “Cinnamon AI” also developed by the company. Instead of simple OCR (optical character recognition), the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is one type of deep learning, finally achieves accurate document reading with a precision rate of 99% or more. The biggest feature is not only the document reading, but also a system that can understand the context of the document and capture information in a semantic manner that databases and other systems can easily handle.

Specific use cases include contracts, resumes, sales progress reports, medical charts, handwritten application forms, real estate property information, receipts, etc. In particular, it is expected to be utilized in the fields of finance and insurance where paper documents are abundant, and it set the general goals of quadrupling business speed and cutting costs to a quarter.

Among the investors participating this round, FFG Venture Partners (the investment arm of Fukuoka Bank) looks at synergy in streamlining document processing at banking operations while system integrators like Itochu Techno-Solutions and TIS are expected to provide the company with partner sales channels leveraging their vast network with potential corporate users.

Cinnamon is also developing Rossa Voice, a voice dictation solution based on an automated word correction technology used for Flax Scanner. Rossa Voice allows users to transcript records at call centers and correctly dictate proper nouns or technical terms in discussions between representatives and customers.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese startup Cinnamon, developing a document reading engine for “white collar” businesses, announced on Monday that it has secured an undisclosed sum of investment. Participating investors are MT Partners (led by angel investor Makoto Takano), Monex Ventures, Vector, RPA Holdings, and four angel investors: Toru Shimada (former Rakuten vice president), Mamoru Taniya (CEO and President of Asuka Asset Management), Akihiko Mori (Renova CFO), and Kazuhiro Ishikura (3Minute CFO).

Miku Hirano, who co-founded Naked Technology and then sold it to Japanese internet giant Mixi, established the company in 2016. Previously referred to as Spicy Cinnamon, the company developed the photo sharing apps “Seconds” and “PicChat”, but then changed its business model from targeting consumers to targeting businesses. The key members of Spicy Cinnamon’s lineup are still playing for the team, but the corporate body has been revised, so it is not clear whether the term “pivot” applies or not.

The company’s main focus is the RPA (robotics process automation) class 2 solution Flax Scanner, which uses the document reading engine “Cinnamon AI” also developed by the company. Instead of simple OCR (optical character recognition), the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is one type of deep learning, finally achieves accurate document reading with a precision rate of 99% or more. The biggest feature is not only the document reading, but also a system that can understand the context of the document and capture information in a semantic manner that databases and other systems can easily handle.

Specific use cases include contracts, resumes, sales progress reports, medical charts, handwritten application forms, real estate property information, receipts, etc. In particular, it is expected to be utilized in the fields of finance and insurance where paper documents are abundant, and it set the general goals of quadrupling business speed and cutting costs to a quarter.

In addition to Flax Scanner, Cinnamon has also begun to develop and provide other AI solutions such as Lapis Engine, which matches users and products, and the chatbot Scuro Bot. Cinnamon’s operation maintains the same network from its Spicy Cinnamon days: business development and sales are mainly conducted in Japan and Singapore, whereas most of the system development, including AI technology, is done in Vietnam.

While it is said that it is difficult to hire AI engineers in Southeast Asia, Cinnamon CTO Hajime Hotta, who also serves as a mentor for AI startup specialized accelerator Zeroth.AI, himself went to Vietnam, gathered students showing high potential from the top three universities, and successfully trained the AI engineers through a 6 month internship program. In addition to strengthening the basic technology and UI of the AI products, the funds raised this time appear to be going towards strengthening the organizational structure in Vietnam and Japan.

In the same field, serial entrepreneur Changsoo Lee from Korea, who exited from his mobile game analytics startup called 5Rocks, founded Allganize to develop an automated system for businesses in Silicon Valley through machine learning, and raised 1 million dollars last November from the KDDI Open Innovation Fund.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda