The OKC Thunder of AI startups — vertically integrated product, obsessive taste, and a team that compounds on itself. Feels like a generational company in the making.
AI VTuber companions. Therapy-and-companionship is quietly the largest GenAI use case, and Shizuku is the native format for it — a16z-backed, $15M seed, built from Tokyo.
Expert-in-the-loop data marketplace for frontier labs. Interned on the Strategic Projects team — saw firsthand how unit economics of expert work are being rewritten for the model era.
Modern banking infrastructure for nonprofits (YC W24). Previously ran product and sales here. The nonprofit financial stack is 20 years behind; Givefront is dragging it into the present.
David Ha and Llion Jones building nature-inspired foundation models from Tokyo. The closest thing Japan has to a frontier lab, and the most credible signal that great model research can happen outside SF.
Answer engine that proved search is unbundling from Google. Distribution through taste — their product, positioning, and partnerships all read as deliberate.
The benchmark for SaaS craft. Proof that opinionated design taste compounds into pricing power; every next-gen dev-tools company references them.
Legal-vertical foundation model layer. The most convincing example of vertical AI beating horizontal AI on an industry with deep workflow moats.
Japan's quiet deep-learning giant — chips, robotics, industrial AI. Shows what a patient, industrial-first AI company looks like outside the SF hype cycle.
Finance automation built around AI-native workflows from day one. The cleanest example of a pre-LLM fintech rebuilding itself on the new primitives without losing its operating discipline.