Startups

It wasn’t until he turned 18 that Daisuke Kuse saw businessmen dressed in dapper suits up close and personal. Until then, Kuse — having spent all of his childhood surrounded by working-class families and friends in a small town in Kyoto Prefecture — had barely the foggiest idea of who they were.

As Japan's population continues to concentrate in greater Tokyo, one startup thinks it has parts of a solution for all the hometowns being abandoned by young people: telepresence.

Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body language.

A Tokyo-based biotechnology venture, Euglena Co., has formed a business tie-up with the World Food Program to introduce a cultivation technique for mung beans to Bangladesh and deliver the beans to Rohingya Muslims who have fled to the country.

Japan's securities industry will ease rules on investing in unlisted stocks to increase the flow of risk money into young companies, hoping to lift the country higher in global rankings of multibillion-dollar startups.

A SoftBank Group-backed startup will release a new app in June that lets users do everything from research a vacation to share travel photos, generating streams of data on tourists that can be sold to hotels.

Asian startups are calling on their governments to open up to foreign investment as a means to accelerate expansion and generate further interest in their markets among potential investors.

Japanese biotechnology startup Green Earth Institute is set to expand into Southeast Asia with plans to manufacture petrochemical substitutes from biomass.

A year after cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck suffered the worst hacking incident in the history of the industry, its founder, Koichiro Wada, attended a news conference to reassure the public that the startup had learned from the experience. But the 28-year-old engineer wasn't the one doing the talking.

A Silicon Valley startup working on self-driving delivery vehicles has announced nearly a billion dollars in fresh funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund.