Japan’s Cinnamon AI secures $12M in series C round, appoints chairman

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Image credit: Cinnamon AI

Updated on Thursday at 9:30am: Kaji’s title was adjusted following the company’s latest announcement that he was approved as a managing director of the executive board at their shareholders meeting.

Japanese startup Cinnamon AI (previously known as Cinnamon), developing a document reading engine and a voice recognition solution leveraging their proprietary AI technologies, announced today that it has secured 1.3 billion yen (about $12 million US) from D4V and Pegasus Tech Ventures in a series C round. The amount includes loans from Sumitomo Mitsui Bank, Japan Fiance Corporation, and Shoko Chukin Bank.

D4V, one of the investors participating in this round, has already invested in the startup via transfer of stocks from an unnamed existing investor in an angel round back in 2018. The latest round follows the startup’s series B round closed in January of 2019 with securing $13.7 million.

At this opportunity, the company announced it has changed its corporate identity into Cinnamon AI (The registered corporate name remains unchanged).

Cinnamon AI’s newly-appointed chairman Yoshimitsu Kaji

The company announced yesterday that it has appointed Yoshimitsu Kaji, the former Chief Marketing Innovator (CMI) of Accenture Japan and Professor at Globis University’s Graduate School of Management, as the chairman and executive officer. The company claims that this is a part of the company’s effort to enhance corporate governance.

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.

The company uses the funds to hire highly-skilled human resources (especially those with high expertise in AI), solidify its organizational structure in Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan, enhance its AI core technologies and user interfaces, and strengthen R&D investments in new areas such as speech recognition and natural language processing.