Promote speedy decision-making for companies using AI
StockMark Inc. Interview
Plug and Play Japan’s 3-month acceleration program,
“Batch 2” has finished last week. We selected 59 startups in 4 verticals (IoT, Fintech, Insurtech, and Mobility) together with 21 large domestic corporate partners for the Batch 2 acceleration program.
This month we interviewed StockMark Inc., a startup from Tokyo University which develops text mining / deep learning-based SaaS!
StockMark is a startup that uses AI technology to support companies’ quick decision making via natural language processing. Currently they are providing 3 services as follows: 1) “Anews”: web distribution service for BtoB, 2) “Asales”: a cloud service that AI analyzes the reason of failure to receive orders from clients and reinforces sales activity, 3) “Astrategy”: a cloud service that analyzes the current market from text data such as news and visualizes management impact in real time.
StockMark is good at structuring “unstructured” text data (free format) that remains inside and outside the company, extracting business needs, scrutinizing enormous data, and extracting highly accurate recommendation and insight by utilizing AI.
In this interview, the Chief Strategist, Mr. Tomoya Harabe and the Chief Alchemist, Mr. Yusuke Morizumi talked about their unique solution and the world that they want to create with their services.
Saori: Among the many services that improve the efficiency of work using AI, what is the strength of StockMark?
Tomoya: The strength of StockMark is that our services can provide a strategic proposal based on collected data using AI and they are not just tools for business efficiency. Originally, our business began as a BtoB service, Anews, that gathers and delivers the news. However, we wanted to provide a service that can improve clients’ business even further, with the use of text analysis and hence we launched Asales in November 2018. Our service analyzes the sales of a company and figures out why their product or services were successfully sold or not on a daily basis or in communication basis between employees, since often there were cases that the companies sales had been handled by their sales person’s soft skill like personality or relationship with the clients. Users can make proposals that lead to an increase in confirmation rate by their clients using recommendations of proposal materials or similar business discussions suggested by Asales.
Yusuke: Since we began offering Anews, we have specialized in natural language processing of Japanese, which is quite a high-context language. Anews is different from the old news clipping services that just collect random newspaper articles. AI automatically selects articles related to the user's companies or business, and it enables to communicate and share them with the team and keeps the team in-tune with the related information. We are focusing on qualitative data because they do not get old or become unusable. Opinion articles and reports that provide an insight into the future are very useful over time. We are concentrating on how to visualize the direction of insight using AI and let people recognize it.
Saori: It’s like AI doing strategy consulting. How do you want to change society and people’s lives using your technology?
Tomoya: I would like to increase the time to do things that only people can do, by leaving the information collection and analysis to AI. I would like our clients to use our service as a tool to raise the business skills of their employees. I think that it would be possible to make it into a world where agile and quick decision making can be made in large corporations. This is the value to introduce AI technology. Not only focusing on one product, but we would also like to create many types of products to realize that world.
Yusuke: I agree. I think the capacity of work for engineers will change more and more with the development of AI. I think that there will be needs not only for specialized engineers of certain businesses but also those who can actively work and think for the whole project through several business fields using AI. I think there will be engineers who experience whole different career paths from before.
Saori: What kind of engineers work for your company?
Yusuke: Many of the engineers at my company have studied machine learning at graduate schools. There are some engineers have the experience of supporting core systems such as Bank ATM, or developing large scale applications, and some engineers who had been doing machine learning at their previous jobs. I think there are many engineers who are not satisfied with their work at large corporate companies, but as AI becomes commonplace in the future, I think that the courage to jump into a whole new field is important as well!
Saori: How did you know about Plug and Play Japan?
Yusuke: Actually, I saw the posting of Plug and Play Japan’s COO, Yazawa-san’s Facebook. What is interesting about Plug and Play is that you have a strong international network. Although your HQ is in Silicon Valley, you have bases all over the world like in Europe or other countries in Asia. I think, the attitude of the Japanese government trying to push more innovation together with private companies is rather similar to the one of Europe. It is interesting to know the latest cases in Europe through Plug and Play.
Saori: How would you like to utilize our acceleration program?
Yusuke: I would like to create a business market together with partners that we got connected through Plug and Play. The fields of the corporations that we can work with are where disruptions are occurring, such as the Mobility field like the automobile industry or Fintech industry like banks or stock firms. Also, it is good branding for us to be selected for Plug and Play’s program, so we would love to have more media exposure using your brand!
Plug and Play Japan’s next 3-month program will start next summer in 2019! Startups who are interested in our next program, please register your information through the below form. The application is open until March 15th!
Please reach out to us anytime if you have any questions about our program!
