AI Salon Tokyo - June 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 - 19:00 Lightning Talk - Training the strongest Japanese LLM
A presentation on the recently released Shisa V2 405B, the strongest model ever trained in Japan. We'll dive into the development process, share interesting discoveries, and, of course, benchmark results. Join us to discover how Shisa.AI, a small yet ambitious team based in Tokyo, achieved this major milestone and what's next.
19:00 - 20:00 Startup Speakers
3rdBrain (Toru Fujimura, Founder & CEO): 3rdBrain's Jane is your AI-powered strategic assistant. It helps you tackle management challenges and brainstorm new business ideas by combining your internal data with trusted external research. Jane uses proven logic and frameworks from leading consulting firms to deliver tailored, reliable, and insight-driven answers.
MEMORY LAB (Kento Hatase, Founder & CEO): "Memory AI" is an intelligence service that supports corporate R&D and new business development. With a database of over 300 million global research records and advanced NLP technology, it enables rapid screening of academic papers, patents, and corporate press releases, significantly shortening strategy planning timelines from years to months.
Xpress AI (Eduardo Gonzalez, Co-founder & CEO): Xpress AI offers digital workforce management for enterprises. Deploy, orchestrate, and scale intelligent digital workers that collaborate seamlessly with your teams. Transform AI potential into predictable productivity with managed digital labor that learns, adapts, and delivers consistent business outcomes.”
Silkworks (Christopher Silkworth, Founder & CEO): Enterprise by Silkworks is an AI executive for your business. Model all of your team's business operations to describe your revenue/cost in terms of actions you actually control, then choose the exact optimal course of action according to your model.
Refined Robotics (Nick Hafner, Co-founder & CEO): Refined Robotics builds all-terrain last-mile package delivery robots, 25x more energy efficient than other robots, and 2x cheaper than traditional last-mile approaches.
Jasmy Lab (Bernd Hollerit, CTO): Jasmy Lab's JANCTION project is a decentralized GPU pool. You can connect your own GPU to earn rewards or rent GPUs to train your AI models. We also offer services such as video rendering, audio stem separation, and many upcoming applications.
OdysseyAI (Erik Almadrones, Founder & CEO): OdysseyAI is an innovator in Direct-to-Consumer Sales and Service, using AI Agents to engage customers, generate leads, and improve customer service outcomes. A SaaS business, our focus sectors are complex, highly-regulated verticals like insurance, banking, and D2C businesses.
Menuwiz (Sydney Seekford, Founder & CEO): Menuwiz uses a private data moat to develop language models specialized for restaurant and F&B use. We support TTOs and DMCs with solutions that make food tourism more engaging, profitable, and sustainable.
Prance AI (大田和 ブラッド, Founder & CEO): Prance AI develops and implements agent-based AI solutions that replace various manual tasks in low-productivity back-office and mid-office operations, such as recruitment. By promoting the use of AI agents, the company aims to help address Japan’s labor shortage problem.
20:00 - 21:00 Food, drinks, and open networking.
21:00 Doors close
Location
SDS, Floor 12 (location visible and accessible to approved participants only).
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 VC firm supporting AI Salon Tokyo. They operate a fund for seed and early-stage startups and KERNEL, a community supporting early entrepreneurs.