C

Cinnamon AI

AI · Tokyo, Japan · Founded 2011

Cinnamon AI is an enterprise artificial intelligence startup, established in 2012 by Miku Hirano, Hajime Hotta, and Yoshiaki Ieda, with its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, and a global presence in the US, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The company specializes in developing AI solutions that automate data extraction from unstructured documents, aiming to enhance business productivity. Co-founder and CEO Miku Hirano, an AI engineer with a background in mobile technology, was inspired to create Cinnamon AI after the birth of her son, envisioning a future work environment where human potential is extended by eliminating repetitive tasks. Prior to Cinnamon AI, Hirano founded Naked Technology, which was acquired by Mixi in 2011. Her work has earned her recognition as one of the 40 young leaders who will shape Japan's future by the Nikkei newspaper. Cinnamon AI's core business revolves around its proprietary AI-powered cognitive document reader, Flax Scanner. This technology is designed to extract and structure data from a wide variety of documents, including handwritten notes, faxes, invoices, and contracts, with high accuracy. The company serves a diverse client base, with over 50 paying corporate customers primarily in Japan's financial sector, including major brands like Dai-ichi Life Insurance and Kansai Electric Power. The business model is B2B, providing solutions that help enterprises streamline data-heavy tasks. The company's product suite includes several AI solutions tailored for business efficiency. Flax Scanner and Flax Scanner HUB are AI-OCR solutions that integrate generative AI to digitize both standard and non-standard forms without requiring pre-set templates. Other products include Rossa Voice for voice data analysis and Aurora Clipper for extracting information from long digital texts. Recently, Cinnamon AI has been developing "Knowledge Hub," an orchestration AI model that combines their automatic knowledge extraction technology with large-scale language models and knowledge graphs to serve industries with deep specialized knowledge like insurance and manufacturing. Since its inception, Cinnamon AI has achieved significant financial milestones. The company has raised a total of $52.9M. This includes a Series B round of $15 million in January 2019 and a Series C funding of $39 million in April 2020. These funds are being used to fuel product development, enhance AI capabilities, and expand its team of machine learning engineers globally. Keywords: intelligent document processing, AI data extraction, unstructured data, Flax Scanner, enterprise AI, financial industry solutions, AI-OCR, cognitive document reader, machine learning, natural language processing, business process automation, document digitization, generative AI, knowledge graph, Miku Hirano, Hajime Hotta, Yoshiaki Ieda, Japanese startup, document understanding