Check Out These Up-and-Coming Seed Stage Startups: GBAF 2024 XLIMIT Showcase

Written by the Universe Editorial Team

At our annual Global Brain Alliance Forum 2024 (GBAF 2024) held in December 2024, five startups selected for the 3rd Batch of our accelerator program XLIMIT (only in Japanese) pitched on stage.

(The affiliations, roles, and performances of each person/company may have changed after the event.)

any style: Addressing the three needs of VTubers

The VTuber market has grown to JPY 100 billion in the past two years, and it is said that this attractive industry will catch up with the worldwide anime industry within a few years. Today, approximately 20,000 VTubers are active in Japan among which 90% are individual VTubers.

any style (only in Japanese) is a startup with a business targeting these individual VTubers. The startup offers two solutions to address their needs which are improving profitability, getting support for their work, and landing brand deals.

The first solution is an app named my dear., which allows VTubers and their fans to have one-on-one conversations. VTubers can send text and voice messages to their fans, enabling them to offer customer experience similar to fan clubs.

Another is my dear.nest, a platform for connecting brands with VTubers for advertisement jobs. Approximately 190 VTubers are on this service, and the total number of reach has exceeded 2.6 million people. Some brand deals have already been closed through this platform, and many diverse initiatives are happening including advertisements projects with East Japan Railway Company and Sapporo City, and esports events with Konami and Tokyo Metro.

CEO Hagiwara envisions to increase the pay rate of VTubers by offering diverse merch and launching a multichannel network (offering content creation and copyrights management support to multiple YouTube channels). He shared his intention to develop a global scale IP network with expansion into North America, Europe, and China in view.

LOOV: Offering digitalized high-quality customer meetings

LOOV (only in Japanese) is a startup which drives forward digital transformation of sales, customer support, and other operations that involves the process of explaining something to customers.

Although approximately 8 million people are engaged in sales work in today’s Japan, it is said that we will face a shortage of roughly 800 thousand workers within the next five years, making the streamlining of sales operations an imminent matter in every industry.

To solve this problem, LOOV offers a SaaS service bearing the name of the company. With this solution, users can record presentations of high-performing sales representatives and convert the data into interactive video content.

The viewers of LOOV’s videos will be asked questions now and then, and sales proposals are automatically optimized based on the answers. This function enables high-quality customer meetings that match the performance of high-skilled sales representatives to be completed through digital means.

In only one to two months since its launch, more than 100 corporations decided to implement the service. The churn rate is maintaining low levels at 0.9%, and this service is receiving strong support from customers.

CEO Uchida strongly expressed his vision to digitalize all operations that include the process of explaining, going beyond sales into operations such as customer success, customer support, hiring, and counter services of municipal offices. He is eager to fully leverage data LOOV has accumulated in order to offer value in various ways.

NexaScience: Using AI to solve the overflow of papers and patents

NexaScience (only in Japanese) is a startup attempting to democratize professional knowledge. CEO Ushiku has been engaged in long years of research on visual recognition AI and came in second place at an international competition in 2012.

Ushiku pointed out that the number of newly published academic papers and patents are rapidly increasing, explaining the reality that even researchers and IP professionals cannot catch up with the latest information. He also referred to the problem corporations are facing, saying some are unable to effectively utilize highly professional information.

InnoSight, an AI-driven platform, is NexaScience’s answer to this problem. InnoSight consists of three different products: InnoSight Papers for researchers and engineers, InnoSight Patents for IP professionals, and InnoSight Collab for driving collaboration among corporations. These solutions assist users to write papers and patents, help them wrap their heads around domain-specific knowledge, and give proposals of technology that the users themselves had not noticed.

Since InnoSight is built on proprietary Taming AI technology, it can offer optimal information according to each user’s expertise. This is a big differentiator from other existing AI services.

Last but not least, NexaScience is a spinout company of the Japanese government’s R&D project which aims for a world where humans and AI are in harmony and produce Nobel Prize-level research by 2050, and its technological capabilities are very high. Ushiku expressed his ambition to leverage his startup’s advantages to transform the research process of science and technology.

Out Loud: An AI agent that helps users prepare for B2B customer meetings

The Japanese working population is said to face a shortage of 11 million workers by 2040. Out Loud (only in Japanese) attempts to solve this social issue by leveraging generative AI to streamline B2B sales operations.

CEO Asazawa pointed out that 64% of the work hours of B2B sales representatives are used to prepare for customer meetings. Especially in the area of enterprise sales, a style where sales representatives identify new opportunities using connections with existing customers, Asazawa says that conventional SaaS tools do not offer sufficient solutions to the users.

Which is why Out Loud offers Pocta, an AI sales agent to solve this problem. With Pocta, sales representatives can analyze the underlying needs of customer companies based on financial data and hiring tendencies, and automatically generate proposal scenarios. Konica Minolta, a user company of Pocta, is experiencing positive outcomes such as being able to conduct the entire process from creating proposal scenarios of top sales representative-level to reaching out to customers in only five minutes.

Out Loud aims to expand its business outside of the B2B sales tech market to a wider market of JPY 8.4 trillion including personnel/outsourcing expenses of sales departments. Asazawa concluded that together with his well-experienced members including former members of startups spun off from the University of Tokyo’s Professor Matsuo’s lab and IP professionals, he is eager to achieve a society where humans work hand in hand with AI workers.

Seven Point One: Early screening of dementia using voices

Seven Point One, headquartered in South Korea, is a startup supporting early detection and improvement of dementia.

CEO Lee shared that 80% of worldwide dementia patients have not received any diagnosis. He went on to say that late detection could result in up to approximately USD 23,000 per year of financial burden for families.

To solve these problems, Seven Point One offers a solution named AlzWIN for early detection of dementia using voice recognition. By assessing 60-seconds voice data of patients, AlzWIN is able to analyze the semantics and verbal fluency to identify early-stage dementia. It prides itself for a high-level of accuracy in diagnosis which reaches 94%. Since patients only need to speak to AlzWIN for the screening process, the physical burden on the patients is reduced compared to other early detection services which use VR or AR.

This solution has already contributed to identifying early cognitive deterioration of over 9,000 patients in South Korea. The startup is ready to expand globally by registering the product with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and achieving 93% accuracy in Japanese-language screenings. Seven Point One is recognized on a global scale, signing partnerships with the largest US dementia research foundation and association, and joining hands with large healthcare corporations and hospitals in Europe.

Lee said that having an Alzheimer’s patient in his family made him recognize the importance of early detection and led him to start his own business. He envisions going beyond diagnosis and growing his business into a platform that covers monitoring and management of the patients’ conditions.