From Hamamoto at TIMEWELL
This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL Corporation.
IVS2025 LAUNCHPAD: The Final Seven
The second half of IVS2025 LAUNCHPAD brought startups working across social infrastructure, healthcare, anime, and energy — each addressing serious, long-standing problems with AI and novel business models. This article covers presenters 9 through 15.
- Procurement AI: ZORI
- Construction Safety and Dental AI: AVETE and Dentscape
- Anime and Advertising: CREATOR'S X and Wunderbar
- Water Infrastructure and Clean Energy: Tenchijin and Hachidori Solar
- Summary: A New Chapter for Japan's Startup Ecosystem
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Procurement AI
9. ZORI Co., Ltd.
ZORI's Kodera, like Notion before it, was born in Kyoto and launched in the US market first. The company targets procurement — a function directly tied to corporate profit where a single mistake can result in tens of millions of yen in losses. Procurement involves 10 major process steps and 30 to 50 sub-tasks per component. Procurement staff navigate hundreds of emails and multiple systems, and still face questions from managers: "Couldn't you have gotten a better price?"
ZORI's platform integrates tools with one click, reads procurement email threads and attached quotes, and builds memory of each supplier's transaction history and performance. Ask "Which supplier can deliver stainless screws the fastest?" and the platform automatically identifies suppliers and presents the optimal choice based on historical data. Negotiation preparation — strategy, market risks, comparable pricing — is automated in parallel.
Construction Safety and Healthcare AI
10. AVETE Co., Ltd.
AVETE's Uttam addressed construction site safety — one of Japan's most costly and persistently unsolved workplace problems. Japan sees 300 construction deaths and 15,000+ serious injuries annually. "It's like a plane crash happening somewhere across Japan's thousands of construction sites every month." Companies spend ¥2 trillion annually on safety and training, ¥3 trillion on compensation and delays, and ¥2.5 trillion on remediation — yet the numbers don't improve.
91% of accidents stem from three causes: inadequate supervision, insufficient training, and workers failing to understand rules or recognize risk. AVETE has built the world's first construction safety ecosystem using deep learning and generative AI, customized for Japanese construction workflows. It runs on mobile phones and IoT devices. Each day begins with hazard prediction training, providing workers with specific risk insights before starting tasks. The system operates in Japanese and workers' native languages — important for foreign laborers and younger Japanese workers who fall through conventional training approaches. Safety training effectiveness improves by 75%; pricing starts at ¥20,000/month, accessible to small contractors.
11. Dentscape Co., Ltd.
Dentscape's Zhou, presenting from Taiwan, introduced AI for dental crown design. 500 million crowns are manufactured worldwide annually — a ¥26.7 trillion market projected to reach ¥46 trillion by 2030. But the dental technician workforce is in crisis: over 80% of US dental labs face hiring problems; in Japan, over 50% of technicians are above age 50 and fewer than 5% are under 25 — the lowest ratio globally.
Dentscape's AI learns from existing teeth to auto-generate 3D crown models: 100 crowns designed in 10 minutes. Work that previously took 4 days is compressed to a fraction of that time, and AI maintains consistent quality regardless of volume — no fatigue on the 100th crown. Like ChatGPT, it remembers each lab's style preferences by observing final adjustments. 85 dental labs are currently in the pilot program, with Harvard School of Dental Medicine among the customers.
Anime and Advertising
12. CREATOR'S X Co., Ltd.
CREATOR'S X's Fujiwara confronted anime's labor crisis directly. A 30-minute TV anime series (12 episodes) requires 70,000 hand-drawn frames. Animators earn at or below minimum wage. Both men and women leave the field at life milestones — not to better creative jobs, but often to unrelated factory work or driving positions. The industry is losing people to sectors with no connection to art.
The company's solution combines "supplemental AI use" with "operational management modernization." For background production: artists sketch rough layouts by hand, AI assists with coloring and detail, and humans complete the final finish. Two-day work becomes 3 hours — 5x productivity improvement. Data protection is handled through a formal legal framework with Mori Hamada & Matsumoto as company counsel; data ownership remains with the company group and AI access is restricted.
In approximately 10 months since founding: 2 M&A deals completed, 70 employees, ¥800 million in revenue. SG&A reduced by 15%. Major title orders won; revenue doubling year-on-year projected. Long-term goal: IP holding company status. Pokémon (¥13 trillion), Hello Kitty (¥11 trillion), Anpanman (¥8 trillion) were cited as IP benchmarks — the company aims to build toward that tier sustainably, as a global breakthrough tech company.
13. Wunderbar Co., Ltd.
Wunderbar's Nagao has an unusual origin story: winner of the Junon Boy competition at 16, he briefly entered the entertainment world. After his father's death, he left school and moved to Tokyo with no home and no money. "I've probably come from the lowest starting point of anyone who's ever presented at IVS." Watching entertainment industry acquaintances lose work during COVID, he decided: "I don't need to be in the spotlight myself — I just want to help from behind the scenes."
Wunderbar's platform makes talent partnerships — previously costing tens of millions of yen — available from ¥100,000 per month, with generative AI enabling instant customization. Changing a product in a talent's hands, adjusting costume colors: done via prompt. AI also recommends optimal talent for specific advertising contexts based on a database of 100,000+ past creative assets. Partnerships that previously took over six months can now be activated from the next day.
Current scale: 400+ talent, 150+ agencies, 90%+ market share. 400+ contracts, ¥80 million MRR, ¥2+ billion cumulative impact. Operating profit margin: above 25%. A long-standing partner told Nagao: "Three years ago I believed in you. This industry is an immovable boulder — but with that conviction you've become infrastructure."
Water Infrastructure and Clean Energy
14. Tenchijin Co., Ltd.
Tenchijin's Sakuraba introduced the "Space Water Bureau" — protecting Earth's water infrastructure using satellite data and AI. Japan detects 20,000 leaks annually; 3 million people's worth of water (more than Kyoto Prefecture's entire population) is lost to leakage. One-third of Japan's post-war water pipes — 160,000 km, four times the circumference of the Earth — have exceeded their 40-year legal service life. Damaged pipes introduce sediment contamination, infection risk, and water outage risk to hospitals and schools.
Current inspection method: inspectors walk above pipes every meter, listening for faint sound transmission indicating leaks, then writing results on paper. "We're still walking, listening, and writing by hand." With the inspector workforce declining, the entire water infrastructure system is approaching its operational limit.
Tenchijin's solution uses multiple satellite data streams to build the world's first service of its type. Satellites capture surface temperature (which reveals subsurface leakage), ground subsidence, and terrain changes. This data, combined with 100+ types of historical information including past leak records and environmental data, trains an AI system that diagnoses leak risk. The interface displays risk by 100-meter segment in five levels — like a health checkup. Registering the highest-risk areas and entering daily inspection capacity allows the AI to generate optimized inspection plans.
Results: 12-year inspection cycle reduced to 1 year; leak detection efficiency per 10km improved 6x; leak-related costs reduced up to 79%. 40+ municipalities have adopted the service in two years; 200+ municipalities have expressed interest. The government announced plans to make DX technology a national standard within three years; former Prime Minister Kishida visited a deployment site. Future plan: develop proprietary satellites with world-leading surface temperature measurement for dramatically higher analysis precision.
15. Hachidori Solar Co., Ltd.
Ikeda of Hachidori Solar closed the competition as "a climate tech company revolutionizing the power system," declaring: "The future where rooftops become power plants will absolutely arrive." As AI, EVs, and IoT expand electricity demand — "a single ChatGPT search consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google search" — Japan's coal-dependent grid cannot keep pace.
Japan's residential solar adoption rate: just 11%. Hachidori Solar's solution: zero upfront cost. Panels and batteries are installed free; users pay a monthly flat fee. By selling equipment to leasing companies, the company reached profitability five months after founding. Now: 100+ partners, nationwide deployment across all 47 prefectures, 7x growth in three years, ¥2 billion projected revenue this fiscal year.
The company's next technology: "i-Power Engine," a world-first device that resolves solar instability — enabling consistent power supply regardless of weather or time of day, and facilitating peer-to-peer electricity sharing between households. The device is provided free; revenue is recouped from electricity cost savings. Three-year targets: 10% domestic market share, ¥30 billion in revenue.
Ikeda's motivation comes from witnessing a friend's house swept away by rising seas in Micronesia during college. "I was powerless then. I'm not now." He closed: "Across companies, regions, and borders — we are serious about stopping climate change. That is Hachidori Solar's mission."
Summary: Japan's Startup Ecosystem Enters a New Phase
IVS2025 LAUNCHPAD demonstrated clearly that Japan's startup ecosystem has entered a new stage of maturity. Grand Prize winner AKIYOSHI of Advance Composite joked in his acceptance speech that he had taken personal leave to attend because his small-town factory colleagues had no idea what IVS was. Then, in earnest: "Manufacturing — especially materials — is a domain where Japan is genuinely world-class. Japan does what it takes to push to the absolute limit. That is Japan's strength."
Judges' reactions were warm across the board. Kyoto University Innovation Capital's Yagi: "I look forward to finding world-changing seeds." Angel investor Fukuyama: "I want to show the world the highest-level judging." Chiba Dojo's Chiba: "After 10+ years as a judge, LAUNCHPAD is still the best." Empowerment's Cathy: "This may have been the most interesting one yet."
Kyoto Governor Nishiwaki noted his pleasure that a manufacturing company had won at "the mecca of manufacturing industries," and praised the judges for "accurately evaluating technology whose value is not visible to the eye."
Investor-Z Award winner Bubbly of CGO.com showed her conviction for global expansion: "Gal culture can compete internationally — not just in Japan." Manga creator Mita Norifusa, who chose the award, encouraged her to "dye the world in gal culture."
All 15 presenting companies carry a clear vision of "Japan-origin, going global" — many have already started international expansion. The presence of companies like Tenchijin and Hachidori Solar, addressing social infrastructure and climate at the global scale, was particularly memorable.
Kyoto — where Japanese tradition and innovation intersect — hosted IVS for the third consecutive year. This LAUNCHPAD showed the world the depth of Japan's startup potential and the maturity of the ecosystem supporting it.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlovKHZDL40
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