Cinnamon, a privately held AI startup that also sells OCR software, already has engineers in Vietnam and Taiwan and raised additional capital last year to ramp up hiring.
Japanese ocr software software#
While AI Inside claims a 64% market share in Japan's market for AI-based OCR software, Japan's rapid adoption of software is fueling competition. Its share price has increased more than fivefold since its initial public offering in December 2019, giving it a market capitalization of $2.5 billion as of Jan. The company expects to turn a profit of 1.1 billion yen ($10.6 million) for the fiscal year ending March 2021, nearly triple the figure in the previous year. The number of contracts for the company's optical character recognition (OCR) software, which can convert handwritten letters into text, more than doubled between July and September to 12,700. New customers included local cities that needed to rapidly process 100,000 yen stimulus handouts during the summer. The major shift came last year, when AI Inside's orders surged as companies and local governments scrambled to process paper documents such as handwritten applications, especially after the Japanese government declared its first state of emergency in April. He believed the large industry was ripe for automation: "Human labor was increasing, despite a declining population. Japan spends about $38 billion each year on outsourcing, about $5.5 billion of which is related to data input, Toguchi said. The 5-year-old startup's Asia expansion highlights how some Japanese software startups, hot on the heels of a boost in demand from the pandemic, are racing to build a footprint overseas.