companies

ELYZA Inc.

Tokyo AI startup spun out of the University of Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, building Japanese-language LLMs and enterprise generative AI tools; majority-owned by KDDI since 2024.

ELYZA was founded in 2018 by researchers connected to the University of Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, one of Japan's best-known AI research groups, with a focus on building large language models tuned specifically for Japanese rather than adapting English-first models after the fact. Early on the company built ELYZA Pencil, a demo writing tool that drafted emails and resumes from a few keywords, and used it to demonstrate what Japanese-native language models could do at a time when most enterprise options were English-centric. In March 2024, ELYZA entered a capital and business partnership with KDDI, and on April 1, 2024 KDDI and its subsidiary KDDI Digital Divergence together acquired a majority stake in the company. The deal gave ELYZA access to KDDI's telecom-scale compute and enterprise customer base while letting the original team continue operating as a distinct AI development unit inside the group. Today ELYZA splits its work between custom LLM research—including a 70-billion-parameter Japanese model, domain-specific models for healthcare, and diffusion-based language model research—and ELYZA Works, a packaged product for building internal generative AI applications without writing code. That combination positions it alongside other Japanese LLM builders like Rinna and Sakana AI, but with a heavier emphasis on enterprise deployment work rather than pure research publication.

Founded

2018

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Sector

lab