Hello, this is Kanta K. I would like to share about my experience going to the 2025 Takeoff Tokyo event as an intern with tsuin.ai. Takeoff Tokyo is an annual event featuring a wide variety of start-ups, investors, panel discussions and start-up pitches. I went there with the goal of hearing from the other start-ups and to network by having conversations and sharing information about tsuin.ai as well. Overall, it was a great experience and I would like to share some of the highlights here.
On the first day of the event, I arrived at Big Sight Tokyo where the event was held, and like the name of the venue suggests, it was a very big building with modern architecture. I found it fitting for an event featuring so many novel technologies and fascinating ideas !
When I arrived at the hall where Takeoff Tokyo was held, I started by talking with the Newell Road start-up. They are developing an artificial intelligence tool for market analysis and business insights to help businesses. What I found interesting was the way their connections to other institutions gave them access to data for the tool that allowed them to have a competitive edge over similar start-ups.
Through further conversations with other start-ups, I learned about uses for AI technology that I was previously unaware of. For example, I talked to a person who was working on an AI to help make dental impressions, collaborating with various dentists across Japan.
I have the impression that when most people think about AI, it is likely they think of ones such as ChatGPT which individual users and consumers can access. However, what I found at Takeoff Tokyo was that there were many other AI tools that were geared towards businesses as well to perform a range of different functions from financial analysis and business insights to planning to become more environmentally friendly. Kurrant.ai is an example of the former and Green AI that of the latter.
I found these to be exciting, because they present opportunities for collaboration between different start-ups in the future. By having conversations at an event like Takeoff Tokyo, I felt that I could be part of the path towards these collaborations. I find this to be one of the values of networking. When I explained about tsuin.ai to people from other start-ups, many of them took an interest, especially those who had experience with software development themselves, and said that they could see using tsuin.ai in their businesses too !
On my second day at Takeoff Tokyo, I had further interesting conversations. For example, there was an AI company called SWIRL which combined many different AI models into one and had impressive capabilities of being able to find and organise data from huge databases. In my conversation with them, they told me about their customers which includes Harvard University, who uses the tool for providing a chat bot to prospective students asking questions about applications to the university. Simultaneously, other customers used the tool for more business applications, where they could automate tasks using databases and drastically reduce the time it took.
One thing that stood out to me was a discussion that I had with the founder of MusicMoney.ai. At first, I approached the booth because music is one of my hobbies and their slogan about music promotion using memes caught my eye. The idea was interesting, where musicians and their fans are able to promote their music using AI which generates promotion media from music and photo material that is provided to the AI by the artist themselves. He remarked that this was an ethical use of AI, because the generation does not make use of any stolen material used without consent. He is developing a tool called IPTO.AI as well, where users can submit media that they want to be used for training AI models. This way, it is paving the way for a more ethical future of AI where data rights are respected. I felt that this was a very important consideration and I appreciated his unique insights and ideas that I believe has lots of potential.