Cogent Labs to use latest funds for product enhancement and overseas expansion
Japanese AI startup Cogent Labs announced the completion of its Series C funding round of US$20.2 million, in a press statement released yesterday.
According to the statement, the startup raised funding from a major global bank through third-party allotment of shares, and from Japan Finance Corporation through a Capital Subordinated Loan.
Cogent Labs had raised $13 million in the first tranche of its Series C financing in March this year through an equity issue to Aizawa-4 Limited Partnership, i Holdings, Comture Corporation, and Japan Co-Invest II Limited Partnership.
With the latest funds, Cogent Lab’s total capital stands at $41.8 million (4,502.5 million yen), including reserves.
Some of its major shareholders include SBI Investment Co. Ltd., Kiwoom Investment, Kyoto Information Processing Service Co., Nomura Holdings, Inc., Mizuho Bank, Ltd., NCORE Ventures, K2 Investment Partners LLC, and Metaplanet Holdings.
Cogent Labs will use these newly obtained funds to enhance its Kaidoku natural language processing platform and other products, as well as accelerate the overseas expansion of its business by localizing its existing services, according to the statement.
Founded in April, 2014 Cogent Labs does research and development of advanced AI and provides related solution services. Their services include:
Tegaki, an AI optical character recognition (OCR) service that allows handwritten documents to be easily saved as data simply by scanning them. It improves operational efficiency and reduces costs by quickly and accurately recognizing characters on hand-written forms used in manufacturing, distribution, finance, healthcare, service, education and other industries.
Kaidoku, a natural language processing platform that can accurately structuralize and analyze language information.
In addition to its currently available news analysis solution, Kaidoku News, Cogent Labs is also working on research and development for new services including Kaidoku Education, and Kaidoku Enterprise Search, a search engine that enables efficient access to and analysis of a company’s information assets.
Time Series Forecasting (TSF), an AI engine that can simultaneously process and analyze time-series data from various markets, and make accurate forecasts based on the results. Cogent Labs currently offers TSF as part of a stock trade volume prediction service, and is also using it in the development of a stock price prediction service.
Custom AI Consulting service which starts from interviewing clients to understand their business process and challenges, and ultimately proposes practical solutions that combine state of the art AI research with engineering.
“With top class R&D capabilities and professional engineers from all over the world, we see great potential with Cogent Labs’ commitment to providing practical services from the customer’s perspective,” said Shoichiro Kusumoto, Executive Officer Investment Department General Manager, Aizawa Investment, at the time of the first tranche of investment.
Kouichi Mukai, Representative Director and Chairman, Comture Corporation added at the time, “This capital and business alliance, will bring synergy to Cogent Labs’ state of the art AI technology and COMTURE’s advance cloud digital solutions (DX) to create new solutions & business opportunities.”
Header Image Courtesy of Cogent Labs
