March 12, 2021

KDDI Corporation

On January 28, 2021, KDDI made an additional investment in Allganize (Headquarters: United States, Founder & CEO: Changsu Lee), a provider of business streaming solutions for corporations using advanced natural language understanding AI, through the "KDDI Open Innovation Fund III" (Operator: Global Brain Inc., hereinafter "KOIF III"), which aims to co-create new businesses with promising startup companies, in the series A2 round. This is the third investment in Allganize, following the seed round (funded by KOIF II) and the series A round (funded by KOIF III).

Allganize leverages advanced AI technology to optimize a number of services, automate business workflows, and support digital transformation (DX), and more. Leading companies in a variety of industries around the world rely on Allganize. KDDI will continue to utilize its support structure to proactively support the improvement of operational streamlining in the market.

As "the company that customers feel closest to," KDDI will continue to promote business co-creation through investment in promising startup companies, and create new business models together with customers and partners.

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• 1. Overview of Allganize

  • (1)

    Company Name: Allganize Inc.

  • (2)

    Headquarters: United States of America

  • (3)

    Established: 2017

  • (4)

    Business Activities:
    

    • Alli - Provides AI chatbots
    • Provides Cognitive Search
    • Provides NLU API (e.g., named entity recognition, text classification, sentiment analysis)
    • Provides AI Enterprise Search
    • AI implementation consulting

  • (5)

    CEO: Changsu Lee

  • (6)

    URL: https://allganize.ai/

• 2. About KDDI Open Innovation Fund

  The KDDI Open Innovation Fund is a corporate venture fund that provides broad support for startup companies. Currently active, KDDI Open Innovation Fund III has a total investment scale of approximately 20 billion yen, and focuses on AI, IoT, big data, and financial technology areas.

• 3. Releases at time of past investments

  Global Brain announces an invest in Allganize, Inc., an AI startup solving enterprise workplace automation, through its KDDI Open Innovation Fund. | Global Brain (globalbrains.com)

  Global Brain has invested in Allganize, Inc., Natural Language Understanding and Conversational AI startup, through its KDDI Open Innovation Fund III | Global Brain (globalbrains.com)