AI Salon Tokyo - April 2025
AI Salon is a global community by and for AI-focused founders, builders, investors, and enterprise partners. The format is a monthly in-person event with lightning talks from startups with a presence in Japan.
Come for the community and to learn about the most recent applications in AI.
Agenda
18:00 Doors open
18:30 - 18:40
Community and supporter announcements.
1. Ilya Kulyatin @ TAI
2. Yusuke Kaga @ JETRO
3. Hiroshi Nemoto @ DEEPCORE
18:40 - 18:55
Guest Speaker on "Harnessing AI Agents for Real-World Applications" (Kwasi Ankomah, Architect@SambaNova):
This talk will highlight practical use cases where intelligent agents are deployed to solve real-world challenges. We’ll look at how agents integrate with large-scale AI systems, enhance decision-making, and manage data in a seamless, automated fashion.
19:00 - 19:25
Guest Panel on "Real-Time Intelligence and the Next Wave of Japanese Innovation", with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, and Hajime Sano from the office of the Chief Digital Information Officer (CDIO) of Nikkei Inc.
A chat between a leading Silicon Valley AI firm and their Japanese partner, bringing both a global as well as a local perspective on AI adoption.
19:30 - 20:15
DateBook (Yuto Yamaguchi, Co-founder & CEO): An enterprise-grade AI scheduling management agent service specifically designed for large corporations with 2,000+ employees, integrated with existing calendar tools such as Outlook and Google Calendar.
fastctl.ai (Petras Petroskevicius, Founder): Tackling Japan’s e-commerce lag with AI-augmented search with semantic search and a chat interface via APIs.
Shisa.AI (Leonard Lin, Co-founder & CTO): Shisa is a family of top-performing and openly licensed bilingual Japanese-English LLM models (7B to 70B parameters). The models are tuned for real-world use cases like translation, role-playing, and instruction-following.
Quest X (Ryosuke Murai, Founder & CEO): AI-first SaaS marketplace, providing SMBs and entrepreneurs lifetime access to AI tools and SaaS solutions from around the world.
Sionic AI (Sigrid Jin, Developer Relations Lead): STORM is a platform for enterprise-level RAG, data processing, and confidential information protection, both on-premise and in the cloud.
Sage-Sentinel (Misaghian Khashayar, Co-founder & CEO): Sage-Sentinel provides a wearable belt that predicts falls 3-5 seconds in advance and sends alerts through the belt or a connected device like a Fitbit, allowing users to react in time. It also tracks movement data, generating risk metrics and assessments for professionals through a dedicated dashboard.
Kisui (Tamir Blum, Founder & CEO): AI-powered off-road robotic platforms to automate work in challenging outdoor environments such as orchards and construction sites. Kisui also provides digital platforms for real-time site monitoring and tracking.
20:15 - 21:15
Food, drinks, and open networking.
21:15 Doors close
Vetting Process
The admission is vetted to make the session relevant to everyone involved. Most of the time, we limit access to:
Recruiters (especially headhunters/agencies)
Most crypto or web3-related (unless part of the 0.1% building something web3 + AI that's actually interesting)
Sales/marketing (especially solutions guys, if not in an AI-focused startup)
More than 2 people for the same organization (it's not a company party) -> we'll select the most relevant applications from the same startup, and reject the others.
Transgressions of the above directions are possible, but very much frowned upon, and at the door, you might get rejected. Please. understand that this is done to build a strong and well-connected ecosystem for the benefit of everyone, including the excluded.
Location
Japan, 〒107-6006 Tokyo, Minato City, Akasaka, 1-chōme−12−３２, Ark Mori Building, 総合案内7階
Take the elevator to Floor 7.
Note that the elevator is located behind the Starbucks in the same building
AI Salon information
AI Salon is a global community by and for AI-focused founders, builders, investors, and enterprise partners.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aisalon-ai/
AiSalon was launched by Jeffrey Abbott, GP at Blitzscaling Ventures, who decided to partner with Tokyo AI (TAI) through JETRO's patronage for the Tokyo chapter.
Tokyo AI (TAI) information
TAI is the biggest AI community in Japan, with 1,600+ members mainly based in Tokyo (engineers, researchers, investors, product managers, and corporate innovation managers).
https://bit.ly/tai_overview
JETRO information
JETRO is a government-related organization that works to promote mutual trade and investment between Japan and the rest of the world.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/jetro-japanexternaltradeorganization/
DEEPCORE information
DEEPCORE is a Tokyo-based AI-focused incubator and VC firm supporting AI Salon Tokyo.