#Japan #Tokyo #AI Agent #Asterminds #InTake

Asterminds Secures 110 Million Yen in Seed Funding for InTake

Asterminds Inc., headquartered in Tokyo and led by CEO Shinjiro Honda, has successfully secured 110 million yen in a seed funding round with Delight Ventures and DNX Ventures as investors. This funding will primarily be used to bolster the product development of their AI hearing agent, InTake, as well as to recruit engineers and business development personnel, and to expand their enterprise customer base.

The Need for Real-Time Insights

With the rapid adoption of generative AI technologies, the utilization of pre-existing data has significantly advanced. However, the most crucial information for corporate decision-making—the voices of employees, candid customer feedback, and tacit knowledge scattered across organizations—still heavily relies on manual interviews or Excel-based surveys. While AI is capable of processing vast amounts of information, the collection of primary information, which provides context, remains a bottleneck.

To tackle this fundamental issue of information intake, Asterminds has developed the AI hearing agent, InTake.

What is InTake?

InTake is designed to automate the entire process of structured interviews necessary for business hearings, from designing and conducting to analyzing. It aims to achieve "scalable listening", enabling businesses to conduct interviews with hundreds or thousands of participants within a matter of days—a task that previously took months with only a limited number of interviewees.

Key Features:

1. Customizable Design: InTake enables the immediate construction of tailor-made hearings based on set objectives, generating optimal question designs and in-depth scenarios through AI. This capability is enhanced by integrating expert knowledge as skills, allowing for adaptations in specialized areas such as internal audits and technical assessments.

2. Optimized Execution: Utilizing tailored dialogues, InTake replicates the information density of face-to-face interviews on a large scale. It delves deeper into responses, yielding approximately 5.5 times more information than traditional surveys per response and completing assessments with hundreds to thousands of participants within days.

3. Integrated Analysis: InTake offers a seamless flow from collection and structuring to reporting, with AI automatically structuring and analyzing the interview results, generating instant insight reports. This aligns the collected primary information with corporate data systems, allowing immediate usage for decision-making.

Since launching its beta version, InTake has successfully conducted numerous large-scale customer surveys and organizational assessments, continuously proving its ability to gather primary data efficiently and effectively. Looking ahead, Asterminds plans to expand its offerings across various domains, including business process reform (BPR), human resources, customer research, and internal audits, transforming the client feedback loop into a fully AI-native infrastructure.

Success Stories:

One notable achievement includes completing a comprehensive organizational review of 500 managers in just seven days, gathering essential operational insights while minimizing the burden on staff. Moreover, it has carried out AI-driven BPR assessments with thousands of employees, auto-converting frontline insights into AI use cases and accelerating the cultivation of a company-wide AI-enabled culture.

Highlighted Research: The State of Generative AI Utilization

In conjunction with this funding announcement, Asterminds conducted a significant survey involving 85 business professionals, primarily senior management, exploring the realities of generative AI usage. The survey revealed deep insights into personal account usage and perceptions of AI impact on promotions and evaluations, matching the depth achieved through expert interviews.

Companies interested in the findings of this survey can access a white paper detailing these insights and more.

Investor Insights

Delight Ventures

Managing Partners Tomoko Namba and Ryu Bandō expressed their enthusiasm for Asterminds’ AI hearing agent. They believe it accelerates business idea planning and validation, making it a compelling product for adoption across various use cases, including internal audits and customer feedback.

DNX Ventures

Managing Partner and Japan Representative Yoshiyuki Kurabayashi stressed the critical role of InTake in addressing industry-wide challenges, emphasizing its potential to structure untapped primary information and enhance business operations.

CEO Statement

Asterminds CEO Shinjiro Honda remarked, "Despite the advancements in generative AI, the crucial context for corporate decision-making still relies on manual methods. Our founding mission is to directly address this challenge. We are grateful for the support of Delight Ventures and DNX Ventures, who deeply understand this need. We are dedicated to building an AI-native data collection framework, enabling organizations to ask the right questions and make informed decisions based on rich context."

Company Overview

• - Name: Asterminds Inc.
• - Established: August 2025
• - CEO: Shinjiro Honda
• - Services: Development and provision of the AI hearing agent InTake and consulting services utilizing InTake.
• - Website: Asterminds.ai