Apr 24, 2020

With the latest financing, Cinnamon AI’s total funding stands at US$29.1 million     Japanese startup  Cinnamon AI , announced in a company statement yesterday, that it has secured US$13 million (JPY 1.3 billion) in a Series C funding round from D4V (Design for Ventures) , a venture capital (VC) fund investing in early-stage Japanese startups, and Pegasus Tech Ventures , a global VC firm with an investment focus on technology companies. New investors Geek Pictures and angel investor Tsuyoshi Natsuno, a professor at Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance, also participated in the round. The funding also includes debt financing from Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation , Japan Finance Corporation , and The Shoko Chukin Bank . The latest funding comes after Cinnamon closed its Series B round in January 2019, with an investment of $13.7 million. With the latest financing, Cinnamon’s total funding stands at $29.1 million, according to Crunchbase . According to a report by BRIDGE , the company also announced that it changed its corporate identity to Cinnamon AI, although the registered corporate name remains unchanged. Additionally, the company announced the appointment of Yoshimitsu Kaji, the former Chief Marketing Innovator (CMI) of Accenture Japan and Professor at Globis University’s Graduate School of Management, as its new Chairman of the Board of Directors. Kaji, who has worked for global companies like Coca Cola and Sony Pictures Entertainment, can help strengthen Cinnamon’s management structure with his global perspective and management experience, according to the company statement . The objective behind the new fundraise is to ‘extend human potential by eliminating repetitive tasks,’ according to the funding statement. The company will use the fresh funds to hire skilled talent in artificial intelligence (AI) globally, strengthen the core technologies and user interfaces of their AI products, provide services in Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan, and create new AI products including Voice Recognition and natural language processing. Founded in 2016 by Miku Hirano , the company initially started as a mobile app developer called Spicy Cinnamon. It had developed photo sharing apps ‘Seconds’ and ‘PicChat’ but later pivoted to developing AI-enabled products. Flax Scanner , Cinnamon’s RPA (robotics process automation) solution, uses the company’s own document reading engine Cinnamon AI. It uses Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a type of deep learning, which achieves accurate document reading with a precision rate of 99% or more, and is widely used for handling documents such as contracts, resumes, sales progress reports, medical charts, handwritten application forms, etc. Rossa Voice, another flagship product of the company, is a voice dictation solution based on an automated word correction technology used for Flax Scanner. It is designed to transcribe records at call centres.