$2.5 billion Japanese AI startup taps Vietnam market

By Dat Nguyen January 28, 2021 | 06:00 pm PT

AI Inside staff inside an office. Photo courtesy of AI Inside.

AI Inside, a $2.5-billion Japanese artificial intelligence startup, has entered Vietnam through a partnership with a local company as part of its global expansion strategy.

The company will partner with OCG Technology, a joint venture between a unit of state-owned Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) and Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, to sell its software to the Vietnam market.

AI Inside’s software converts paper documents into electronic data using artificial intelligence, and its target customers are companies that want to automate manual tasks like typing handwritten forms into spreadsheets.

The five-year-old startup, which claims a 64 percent market share in Japan’s market for AI-based optical character recognition (OCR) software, has seen its number of contracts for the software double between July and September last year, according to a Nikkei report.

Its share price has increased fivefold since its initial public offering in December 2019, giving it a market capitalization of $2.5 billion.

The company is also planning to expand to other Asian markets like Thailand and Taiwan.