Sumitomo Corporation Invests in AI Product Developer Cinnamon, Inc.

Sumitomo Corporation (Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director, President and Chief Executive Officer: Masayuki Hyodo) has invested in Cinnamon, Inc. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; hereinafter, “Cinnamon”), which develops/provides AI-related products and services.

Cinnamon develops AI-related products that enhance office productivity, with the “Flax Scanner” AI OCR (Note) System as its mainstay product. The “Flax Scanner” is a system able to identify characters in texts and unstructured business documents, including handwritten texts that have heretofore been difficult to read, to a high degree of precision and convert/structure these into data that can be read into a database. The training of engineers for the AI market has not kept pace with the speed of market expansion, and there is an ongoing shortage of AI engineers. Cinnamon has accordingly established a program for hiring several dozen engineers yearly from an AI laboratory at its development base in Vietnam, and it has a strong product development capability.

Sumitomo Corporation will collaborate with Cinnamon and utilize Cinnamon products to advance the digital transformation (hereinafter, “DX”) of the entire Sumitomo Corporation Group. In its Medium-term Management Plan 2020, Sumitomo Corporation is seeking to enhance its existing businesses and to use platform business and DX to create businesses that will provide new primary sources of revenue for the next generation. In creating these new next-generation businesses, the Company has examined future megatrends and identified three growth sectors in which it can put its strengths to good advantage – technology x innovation, healthcare and social infrastructure – and will be actively investing management resources in these with an eye to the future.


(Note) OCR: Optical Character Recognition/Reader
A function allowing characters in printed materials, etc., to be read using a scanner or camera, and then converted into data usable by computers


 


■Sumitomo Corporation’s  Material Issues
Sumitomo Corporation Group positions “Six Material Issues to Achieve Sustainable Growth with Society” as an important factor in developing business strategies and in the decision-making process for individual businesses. Going forward, we will pursue sustainable growth by resolving these issues through our business activities. This Project especially contributes to “Contributing to the Development of Local Communities and Industries”.