What Lightblue does

Lightblue (株式会社Lightblue) is a Tokyo-headquartered, Tokyo University-spinout AI company founded in January 2018 by Sonoda Adumu, operating two product lines on a shared multimodal AI platform. The first, branded simply as Lightblue (formerly Lightblue Assistant), is an enterprise generative AI assistant delivered through Slack and Microsoft Teams that wraps ChatGPT with built-in RAG over per-department knowledge sources, ISO/IEC 27001 and 27017 compliant security, SSO via HENNGE One, and AI-agent-driven calendar and email automation; pricing is per-seat, with publicly listed entry-level pricing of ¥980 per user per month and organization-wide ID licensing for enterprise contracts. The second, Human Sensing, is a computer vision system for industrial and construction environments that performs pose estimation, action recognition, and behavior analysis on camera footage, including a joint-developed heavy-equipment-mounted AI camera with Shimizu Corporation that demonstrated over 90% collision-prevention detection accuracy.

Underpinning the language product is ao-Karasu, an in-house Japanese-specialized LLM family (72B and 7B variants) developed by Lightblue's LLab research team, which benchmarked #2 on MT-Bench Japanese as of March 2024 and supports on-premise deployment for security-restricted customers. The company sells through a direct enterprise sales motion in Japan, supplemented by a heavy event-driven pipeline including weekly and monthly webinars, multi-day Boot Camp workshops, and major trade show presence (CES 2026, AI Expo, Interop Tokyo), often featuring co-presentations with flagship customers such as Shimizu Corporation (3,000+ active users), Kawada Group (1,100 IDs), Nippon Paper Industries (1,500 users), Exedy (500 IDs), Omron Healthcare (72% utilization), Konica Minolta (90% RAG accuracy), and Kansai Television Broadcasting (ABU Award winner for AI-assisted subtitle production).

Revenue is generated primarily through monthly recurring subscriptions under per-seat and per-organization pricing, supplemented by optional hardware rental (cameras and edge devices) bundled with the Human Sensing product. The customer base spans construction, manufacturing, infrastructure, food, healthcare, media, and utilities, with deployments ranging from single-department PoCs to full-company, multi-thousand-seat rollouts. Lightblue is privately held, founded with reported backing from DIP and GAUSS, and operates with a headcount of 11-50 employees, suggesting a growth-stage enterprise AI vendor in the expansion phase rather than a mature scaled platform.

Name

Lightblue

Legal name

株式会社Lightblue

Website

https://lightblue-tech.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2018

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Lightblue is a Tokyo University-spinout AI company that sells a Slack/Teams-native Japanese generative AI assistant (with per-department RAG and AI agents) and a Human Sensing computer vision platform for workplace safety, serving primarily large Japanese enterprises across construction, manufacturing, media, and utilities.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Tokyo

HQ country

Japan

HQ region

Asia

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure, Operations

Revenue model

1. Lightblue (AI Assistant) Subscription: Monthly subscription-based AI assistant service providing enterprise employees with a personal AI assistant via Slack/Teams integration with ChatGPT. Includes RAG capabilities, AI agent automation, SSO support, and multi-source data integration. Priced on a per-ID (seat) basis with monthly billing.
2. Human Sensing AI Subscription: Monthly subscription service for image analysis AI focused on human behavior in real-world settings. Includes hardware rental (edge devices, cameras) as an optional add-on. Sold as a monthly flat rate with no pro-rata adjustments for mid-month start/end.
3. Rental Hardware Services: Optional rental of designated hardware (cameras, edge computing devices) for use with Human Sensing service. Hardware is rented for the contract term period and must be returned within 30 days of contract end. Customers may purchase the hardware at a specified price during or at the end of the contract.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels8 records

Core offering

Lightblue sells two enterprise AI software products: (1) "Lightblue", a generative AI assistant integrated with Slack and Microsoft Teams that provides natural-language Q&A, document summarization, AI agent automation, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) over an organization's internal documents; and (2) "Human Sensing AI", a computer vision solution that analyzes camera footage for workplace safety (e.g., person-equipment collision prevention) and operational analytics. Both products are sold on per-seat or per-organization monthly subscriptions primarily to large Japanese enterprises.

Product overview

Lightblue offers a dual-product portfolio centered on multimodal AI for enterprise and industrial applications. The core offering consists of Lightblue Assistant, a generative AI assistant integrated with Slack and Teams featuring RAG-based knowledge retrieval and AI agent automation capabilities, and Human Sensing AI, a computer vision system for analyzing human activities, poses, and behaviors from camera footage for workplace safety and operational efficiency. A proprietary Japanese LLM (ao-Karasu) underpins the language capabilities. These products address enterprise knowledge management, field operations, and real-time video analytics use cases.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Lightblue (AI Assistant) Enterprise generative AI assistant integrated with Slack and Microsoft Teams that delivers natural-language Q&A, document summarization, drafting, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) over an organization's internal documents. Includes AI agent capabilities for autonomous calendar/email tasks, per-assistant knowledge separation, SSO via HENNGE One, and integrations with Box and SharePoint. Sold to large Japanese enterprises on per-ID (per-seat) monthly subscriptions.
• Human Sensing AI Person-focused computer vision solution that uses pose estimation, action recognition, position tracking, facial orientation, emotion estimation, and object detection to analyze human states and activities from real-time camera footage. Used for workplace safety (person-equipment collision prevention, fall detection, unsafe-behavior alerts) and operational efficiency in construction, manufacturing, logistics, and infrastructure. Sold as a monthly flat-rate subscription per organization, with optional hardware rental (cameras, edge devices) and a PoC package plan.
• ao-Karasu (Japanese LLM) Proprietary Japanese-specialized large language model family developed by Lightblue's LLab team. The 72B parameter variant achieves top-tier Japanese language benchmark performance (ranked #2 on MT-Bench Japanese LLM benchmark as of March 2024). The 7B parameter distilled variant enables on-premise deployment for enterprises where data cannot leave the organization. The models underpin Lightblue's generative AI assistant product offering.

Quantifiable outcome

• 90% RAG accuracy rate
• +5 more outcomes

Named customers16 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration5 records

AI capability9 records

Feature6 records

Partnerships

Eleven partnerships are on record, tiered core, flagship and strategic.

• HENNGE One (HENNGE株式会社)coreTechnology or Integration · 17 February 2026Lightblue's AI assistant 'Lightblue' integrated with HENNGE One's cloud security platform to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) for enterprise users. This partnership minimizes account management overhead while providing IP restrictions and multi-factor authentication (device certificates) for governance-compliant generative AI use. Benefits include seamless login to Lightblue and enterprise-grade access control.
• 関西テレビ放送株式会社 (Kansai Television Broadcasting)flagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 10 December 2024Joint project to deploy Lightblue across Kansai TV's entire organization for broadcast operations and general business. This partnership was featured as a model case of AI adoption in the media industry and has produced internationally recognized results (ABU Award for AI-assisted subtitle production).
• NVIDIA (エヌビディア合同会社)coreTechnology or Integration · 22 May 2024Joint seminar (May 2024) titled 'Enterprise Custom LLM Development & Implementation Possibilities' held at NVIDIA's Tokyo Big Site venue. NVIDIA provided GPU/computing platform expertise while Lightblue contributed Japanese LLM development capabilities. Partnership centers on GPU-accelerated LLM development for enterprise customers and Lightblue's own model training.
• Alibaba Cloud (Alibaba Cloud社 / DAMO Academy)coreTechnology or Integration · 13 March 2024Alibaba Cloud provides technical support and access to the Qwen open-source LLM as the base model for Lightblue's proprietary Japanese-specialized LLM 'ao-Karasu.' Lightblue uses Qwen 1.5 72B as the foundation, applying Japanese fine-tuning. Alibaba Cloud's Apsara Conference provided a platform for Lightblue to present its Japanese LLM initiatives.
• 清水建設株式会社 (Shimizu Corporation)flagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 28 July 2020Joint development of a heavy equipment-mounted AI camera monitoring system for mountain tunnel construction sites, targeting elimination of person-equipment collision accidents. Demonstrated over 90% detection accuracy. This partnership has expanded to include full-company generative AI deployment with 3,000+ active users.
• BoxcoreTechnology or IntegrationLightblue integrates with Box cloud storage platform, enabling enterprise customers to leverage documents and content stored in Box as knowledge sources for the RAG-powered AI assistant. Kawada Group specifically plans to use Box integration for cross-group knowledge search and summarization.
• Microsoft SharePointcoreTechnology or IntegrationLightblue supports SharePoint as a data source for its RAG functionality, enabling enterprise customers to integrate internal SharePoint document repositories as knowledge bases for the AI assistant.
• OpenAI (ChatGPT)coreTechnology or IntegrationLightblue's core AI assistant product is built on ChatGPT (GPT) as the underlying LLM engine, integrated via API. Lightblue provides the enterprise wrapper including RAG, SSO, data source integrations, and security controls around ChatGPT for corporate use.
• Slack / Microsoft TeamscoreTechnology or IntegrationLightblue operates as a Slack and Teams application, providing AI assistant functionality directly within enterprise communication platforms. Users interact with the AI assistant via Slack/Teams chat interface, eliminating the need for separate tool adoption.
• 中部電力株式会社 (Chubu Electric Power)coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerJoint development of unsafe behavior detection AI for staircase safety at Chubu Electric Power facilities. AI uses pose estimation, facial orientation, and image classification to detect unsafe actions (looking away, not holding handrails, skipping steps) and issue alerts to prevent falls and injuries.
• AINOW (株式会社dip)strategicGTM or Marketing PartnerAINOW (Japan's leading AI media platform operated by dip Corporation) features Lightblue case studies, LLab team interviews, and joint webinar content. AINOW's editor-in-chief (おざけん/小澤健祐) frequently co-presents at Lightblue events, providing credibility and audience reach in the Japanese AI community.

Scale indicators9 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• ELYZA: Japanese AI startup (University of Tokyo origin) building Japanese-specialized LLMs and enterprise AI solutions. Direct competitor in the Japanese enterprise LLM assistant market with similar university-spinout DNA.
• Stockmark: Japanese AI startup providing enterprise-focused LLM applications and document intelligence for Japanese corporates. Closely comparable as a domestic enterprise AI/LLM platform serving large Japanese organizations.
• PKSHA Technology: Listed Japanese AI platform company offering NLP and machine learning solutions for enterprise knowledge management, customer support, and document processing. Comparable in targeting Japanese enterprise knowledge workflows with AI.
• AI inside: Japanese AI company providing AI-OCR and enterprise generative AI services including LLMs for Japanese businesses. Comparable in offering enterprise AI platforms with Japanese language optimization.

Emerging players

• Sakana AI: Tokyo-based foundation model company building cutting-edge Japanese AI models. While more research-focused, Sakana competes in attracting Japanese AI talent and serves overlapping enterprise Japanese-language AI demand.
• rinna: Japanese conversational AI platform with Japanese-specialized LLMs, originally a Microsoft Japan / Toyota spinoff. Comparable in Japanese language AI models and enterprise chatbot deployments.
• Turing: Japanese AI startup developing large-scale Japanese foundation models targeting autonomous driving and enterprise applications. Comparable in the pursuit of proprietary Japanese-language foundation models.

Others

• HENNGE: Cloud security (SSO) vendor whose HENNGE One platform integrates with Lightblue. HENNGE is a complementary ecosystem partner and a benchmark for Japanese enterprise SaaS scale.

Broad incumbents

• Microsoft Copilot for Japan: Microsoft's enterprise AI offerings (Copilot, Teams AI) competing for the same Slack/Teams-integrated enterprise assistant use case in Japan. Broad incumbent with overlapping go-to-market against Japanese enterprise IT budgets.
• ChatGPT Enterprise (OpenAI): OpenAI's enterprise tier offering a direct alternative to Lightblue's assistant. Strategic upstream partner via API but also competes in the same Japanese enterprise procurement budgets.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/lightblue_tech
• YouTubeyoutube.com/channel/UCZKoOXtvhJfqz8FA9MeQ7Lg
• Facebookfacebook.com/profile.php
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/lightblue-tech

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles5 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors2 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments1 record

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Lightblue