companies

Orange Inc.

Tokyo startup using AI-assisted translation and lettering to bring untranslated Japanese manga to English readers faster.

Orange Inc. was founded in Tokyo in 2021 by Shoko Ugaki, aiming at what the company frames as a straightforward problem: thousands of manga titles never get an official English release because traditional translation and lettering can't keep pace with how much is published in Japan. Orange built computer-vision and NLP models specifically for manga — reading text out of panels, handling sound effects and layout, and speeding up the translation pipeline — while keeping a human localization team, which it calls Studio, reviewing and finishing every page. The company raised roughly $19.5 million in a pre-Series A round in 2024 from investors including publisher Shogakukan alongside Globis Capital Partners, ANRI, SBI Investment and others, bringing its total raised to about $20.5 million. In 2025 it launched emaqi, a digital manga storefront for the US and Canada, debuting with roughly 13,000 volumes across about 1,700 titles.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Sector

applications