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LA startup Cashi Cake secures $3.7M to promote seaweed-based functional sweets, beverages

The Bridge 2023.11.21

Los Angeles-based Cashi Cake, the Japanese startup behind the Misaky Tokyo seaweed confectionery brand and the OoMee seaweed beverage brand, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $3.7 million US in the 1st close of its Series A round. Participating investors include Mitsubishi Foods (TSE: 7451), Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, and undisclosed venture capital firm(s) as well as angel investors including Masaki Yamamoto (CEO, Chatwork), Shinichi Takama, Kazutaka Mori (international attorney, One Aisa Lawyers), Yu Kaneko (qualified institutional investor), and Hiroyuki Miyake (CEO, Synergy Plus). For the company, this follows their two angel rounds (securing approximately 60 million yen in total) and the 1st close of its seed round back in 2022 (since the seed round’s 2nd close has not been announced, so in effect this appears to be the final close of the seed round). The latest round brought the startup funding sum up to date to $5.6 million US. Our readers may recall the company secured a seed round from Chiba Dojo Fund, Coconala Skill Partners (CSP), and Headline Asia as well as two angel investors: Hiromi Okuda, and Shin Murakami. The company revealed at this time that Japanese microalgae developer Euglena (TSE: 2931) also…

Misaky.Tokyo and OoMee
Image credit: Cashi Cake

Los Angeles-based Cashi Cake, the Japanese startup behind the Misaky Tokyo seaweed confectionery brand and the OoMee seaweed beverage brand, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $3.7 million US in the 1st close of its Series A round. Participating investors include Mitsubishi Foods (TSE: 7451), Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, and undisclosed venture capital firm(s) as well as angel investors including Masaki Yamamoto (CEO, Chatwork), Shinichi Takama, Kazutaka Mori (international attorney, One Aisa Lawyers), Yu Kaneko (qualified institutional investor), and Hiroyuki Miyake (CEO, Synergy Plus).

For the company, this follows their two angel rounds (securing approximately 60 million yen in total) and the 1st close of its seed round back in 2022 (since the seed round’s 2nd close has not been announced, so in effect this appears to be the final close of the seed round). The latest round brought the startup funding sum up to date to $5.6 million US. Our readers may recall the company secured a seed round from Chiba Dojo Fund, Coconala Skill Partners (CSP), and Headline Asia as well as two angel investors: Hiromi Okuda, and Shin Murakami. The company revealed at this time that Japanese microalgae developer Euglena (TSE: 2931) also participated in the previous seed round.

Founded in Los Angeles in September of 2019 by Alissa Miky, Cashi Cake uses technology to process seaweed agar to develop its high-end Japanese confectionery products. In addition to serving their products to the Academy Awards and Emmy Awards eve, the company collaborated with Kim Kardashian’s fragrance brand KKW and was featured in the Bon Appétit food magazine. The company has earned over 1.4 million followers on its Tiktok brand account (Misaky.Tokyo). They will use the funds to hire talents and administrative expenses for brand expansion, as well as product and patent development for selling functional seaweed powder to businesses.

In conjunction with the funding, the company also announced that it will apply for a joint patent with the Tottori Institute of Industrial Technology. The company will apply the institute’s technology for wrapping soy sauce in a membrane created from seaweed to wrapping highly concentrated alcohol, thereby providing a plastic substitute that can be used with any material. Until now, it has been difficult to encapsulate highly concentrated alcohol with the dietary fiber contained in seaweed, but the new technology will make it possible to encapsulate high-alcohol (tequila, gin, whiskey, sake, etc.) and low pH liquids (orange juice, etc.) in any shape or size. It is expected to realize a new texture with a film that pops when chewed in the mouth, and to develop edible containers.

via PR TImes

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Fukuoka City helps shorten visa screening process for foreign IT engineers

fukuoka

Masaru Ikeda 2023.11.14

On Monday, Fukuoka City began operating the Engineer Visa program utilizing the National Strategic Special Zone. In 2019, the city requested the central government to approve a system to shorten and clarify the examination period for foreign IT engineers’ status of residence. Whereas the normal examination period for residency status for foreign nationals takes about one to three months, the special legislation can make it shorter to about one month with the city taking part of the examination process. This will lower the hurdle for Japanese startups based in the city to hire foreign engineers and for foreign startups to establish their base there. The first company to take advantage of the system is expected to be the Japanese subsidiary of VMO Holdings, an offshore development company in Vietnam. Fukuoka City has long been active in attracting overseas startups and encouraging local startups to expand overseas: in 2016, the city began collaborating with the French city of Bordeaux to support drone startups, and in 2017, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Taiwan’s Taipei city to support Fukuoka startups expand overseas and vice versa. In 2017, Fukuoka City established the Fukuoka Global Startup Center to strengthen mutual startup support between…

On Monday, Fukuoka City began operating the Engineer Visa program utilizing the National Strategic Special Zone. In 2019, the city requested the central government to approve a system to shorten and clarify the examination period for foreign IT engineers’ status of residence. Whereas the normal examination period for residency status for foreign nationals takes about one to three months, the special legislation can make it shorter to about one month with the city taking part of the examination process.

This will lower the hurdle for Japanese startups based in the city to hire foreign engineers and for foreign startups to establish their base there. The first company to take advantage of the system is expected to be the Japanese subsidiary of VMO Holdings, an offshore development company in Vietnam.

Fukuoka City has long been active in attracting overseas startups and encouraging local startups to expand overseas: in 2016, the city began collaborating with the French city of Bordeaux to support drone startups, and in 2017, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Taiwan’s Taipei city to support Fukuoka startups expand overseas and vice versa. In 2017, Fukuoka City established the Fukuoka Global Startup Center to strengthen mutual startup support between the city and other countries.

In 2012, the city declared “Startup City” and then established a startup support facility called FUKUOKA Growth Next on the site of the former Daimyo Elementary School. This year, the Fukuoka Daimyo Garden City building was completed adjacent to the facility, and Fukuoka Financial Group (TSE: 8354) opened its open innovation center called GROWTH I in the terrace annex of the building.

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Japanese Government opens entrepreneurs’ base in SF Bay Area

METI

Masaru Ikeda 2023.11.14

The Japanese Government is establishing a center for entrepreneurs in Palo Alto called Japan Innovation Campus. Its arm METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, held a reception party to celebrate the launch of it on Sunday, inviting Yasutoshi Nishimura, the Japanese Economic Minister. Other guests included Palo Alto Mayor Lydia Kou, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and the head of Geodesic Capital John Ruus as well as local Japanese investors and entrepreneurs. The venue is conveniently located just three blocks from University Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the city, and close to Stanford University, which is known for producing many startups. It is managed by Mori Building and Accenture under contract from METI. About five companies will be selected as office members that can use private offices, and 50 companies will be selected as co-working members that can use shared space (up to three people per company) while applications have been already closed. The venue was established as part of the Japanese government’s “Five-Year Startup Development Plan,” and has been designated as one of the venues for J-StarX, a program promoted by the Ministry to send Japanese entrepreneurs to startup hubs in the overseas. By linking Japanese entrepreneurs,…

Japan Innovation Campus
Image credit: METI

The Japanese Government is establishing a center for entrepreneurs in Palo Alto called Japan Innovation Campus. Its arm METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, held a reception party to celebrate the launch of it on Sunday, inviting Yasutoshi Nishimura, the Japanese Economic Minister. Other guests included Palo Alto Mayor Lydia Kou, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and the head of Geodesic Capital John Ruus as well as local Japanese investors and entrepreneurs.

The venue is conveniently located just three blocks from University Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the city, and close to Stanford University, which is known for producing many startups. It is managed by Mori Building and Accenture under contract from METI. About five companies will be selected as office members that can use private offices, and 50 companies will be selected as co-working members that can use shared space (up to three people per company) while applications have been already closed.

The venue was established as part of the Japanese government’s “Five-Year Startup Development Plan,” and has been designated as one of the venues for J-StarX, a program promoted by the Ministry to send Japanese entrepreneurs to startup hubs in the overseas.

By linking Japanese entrepreneurs, students, and others with local accelerators, VCs, universities, JETRO and other government agencies, the program aims to support the global expansion of Japanese startups and the development of the ecosystem. Through organizing events, it also aims to encourage open innovation between the two sides of the Pacific.

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Sagri partners with Thai conglomerate to roll out satellite data-based farm soil analysis

Masaru Ikeda 2023.11.10

Sagri, the Japanese startup behind a satellite-based agricultural analytics platform under the same name, announced on Monday that it has agreed to conduct a proof-of-concept（PoC） project with Thailand’s largest conglomerate CP Group (Chalung Pokaphan Group). The startup will conduct tests of satellite data-based soil analysis with CP Group’s BKP (Bangkok Produce Merchandising). The tests will be conducted on corn farmland in the northeastern part of Thailand to confirm that Sagri’s soil analysis method can be performed more quickly and inexpensively than conventional ways. In the future, based on the the analysis result, the startup envisions a project to generate carbon credit derived from farmland by optimizing fertilizer application. This partnership was revealed during the 5th batch Demo Day of Rock Thailand, an open innovation-focused pitch event run by the Embassy of Japan in Thailand and CP Group since 2019. The event is part of the

Sagri, the Japanese startup behind a satellite-based agricultural analytics platform under the same name, announced on Monday that it has agreed to conduct a proof-of-concept（PoC） project with Thailand’s largest conglomerate CP Group (Chalung Pokaphan Group). The startup will conduct tests of satellite data-based soil analysis with CP Group’s BKP (Bangkok Produce Merchandising).

The tests will be conducted on corn farmland in the northeastern part of Thailand to confirm that Sagri’s soil analysis method can be performed more quickly and inexpensively than conventional ways. In the future, based on the the analysis result, the startup envisions a project to generate carbon credit derived from farmland by optimizing fertilizer application.

This partnership was revealed during the 5th batch Demo Day of Rock Thailand, an open innovation-focused pitch event run by the Embassy of Japan in Thailand and CP Group since 2019. The event is part of the 2nd batch of Rock Thailand in 2019. Starting with this opportunity, Sagri has begun researching its entry into the Thai market, established a Singapore subsidiary in January, and has been in ongoing discussions with CP Group.

Following securing 100 million yen ($1.4 million US in the exchange rate at the time) in a seed round in June of 2021, Sagri formed a capital and business alliance with Softbank’s SB Technology in 2022, and was subsequently selected for the 4th batch of the accelerator program run by Japan Agricultural Co-operatives for business collaboration.

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Japan’s Stockmark launches open-source LLM with 13 billion parameters, less hallucinations

Stockmark

The Bridge 2023.10.30

Tokyo-based Stockmark, the Japanese startup developing and offering sentence analysis AI solutions for businesses, launched a proprietary large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters called Stockmark-13b on Friday. This is the largest scale of any single Japanese language LLM and has been developed with assistance by the AWS LLM Development Support Program. Leveraging disclosed company information and patent updates the company has been collecting, the model is able to return more accurate answers to business questions compared other LLMs by suppressing so-called hallucinations. In addition, the new model can generate text about four times faster than ChatGPT. In August, Stockmark also introduced gpt-neox-japanese-1.4b, a Japanese LLM with 1.4 billion parameters based on the GPT-NeoX LLM learning library. Subsequently, the company was qualified by Amazon Web Services Japan for its LLM Development Support Program in September where they have been developing an LLM that can answer questions on business with higher accuracy and speed using the cloud platform’s proprietary AI accelerator Trainium. The company intends to build LLM that can be used in practice in specific business use cases, such as new business development, application exploration, and technology development Stockmark was founded in April of 2016 by four engineers, including…

Tokyo-based Stockmark, the Japanese startup developing and offering sentence analysis AI solutions for businesses, launched a proprietary large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters called Stockmark-13b on Friday. This is the largest scale of any single Japanese language LLM and has been developed with assistance by the AWS LLM Development Support Program. Leveraging disclosed company information and patent updates the company has been collecting, the model is able to return more accurate answers to business questions compared other LLMs by suppressing so-called hallucinations. In addition, the new model can generate text about four times faster than ChatGPT.

In August, Stockmark also introduced gpt-neox-japanese-1.4b, a Japanese LLM with 1.4 billion parameters based on the GPT-NeoX LLM learning library. Subsequently, the company was qualified by Amazon Web Services Japan for its LLM Development Support Program in September where they have been developing an LLM that can answer questions on business with higher accuracy and speed using the cloud platform’s proprietary AI accelerator Trainium. The company intends to build LLM that can be used in practice in specific business use cases, such as new business development, application exploration, and technology development

Stockmark was founded in April of 2016 by four engineers, including CEO Tatsu Hayashi, who had worked for a major Japanese trading company. Having developed various services by recommending and structuring disclosed news updates from websites, the company is currently offering a news clipping service for businesses called Anews as well as a tool visualizing market trends and competitors’ movements through structured analysis of business news updates called Astrategy. The company claims that about 25% of the companies nominated for the Nikkei 225 index use any of Stockmark’s products.

via PR Times

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