Reflections from the Japan-U.S. Innovation Awards 2026
Venue: Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University
On July 16, 2026, HACARUS was selected as one of the Showcase companies for the Japan-U.S. Innovation Awards 2026, and we took part in the symposium held at Stanford University. The room brought together entrepreneurs working to bring Japanese technology to Silicon Valley and the wider world, the VCs who support them, and companies running at the frontier of AI — Anthropic, Sakana AI, and LegalOn Technologies among them. From morning to evening, it was a dense and rewarding day.
In this post, I’d like to look back on the five sessions of the day and share some of what struck me.
From the Opening to the Showcase Company Pitches
HACARUS Presentation
The opening posed a question: how do we bring technology into society safely and responsibly? The approaches taken by Anthropic and Sakana AI were touched on here as well. The organizers then explained that the Showcase companies are chosen carefully, over a long process, against criteria such as how innovative they are, how relevant they are to both Japan and the U.S., and the fact that they are not yet widely known in the American market.
Then came the five companies selected for this year’s Showcase. There was us at HACARUS, offering AI visual-inspection products that take on labor shortages; I Peace, which mass-produces iPSCs and works to bring them into wider use; KORTUC, whose radiosensitizer safely and reliably improves the effectiveness of radiation therapy; OOKUMA DIAMOND DEVICE, working on diamond semiconductors; and Pale Blue, developing satellite engines propelled by water. The fields were all over the map, but what they shared was a determination to build globally competitive businesses on the strength of “technology from Japan.”
LegalOn Technologies on the Importance of Focusing Deeply
One of the sessions that stayed with me was the talk by Vanessa Davis of LegalOn Technologies. In an era where AI models are becoming commoditized, where does real competitive advantage come from? Her answer was “the harness.” A general-purpose generative AI is like “an engine with no harness attached” — powerful, but uncontrollable as it is. What creates value, she argued, is the mechanism that turns that power into something genuinely usable in practice, built on deep domain knowledge and a thorough understanding of the user.
Rather than aiming for “AI for everyone,” LegalOn narrowed in on a single point — the in-house legal professional — and grew its product starting from the most painful task of all: the first-pass review of contracts. As phrases like “hyper-focus” and “laser-focus” came up again and again, the message was clear: don’t broaden and then deepen; prove yourself deeply first, then broaden. For a company founded in Japan trying to build products that hold up in the U.S. market, I found it a genuinely instructive talk.
Anthropic and Sakana AI: Two Shapes of Growth
In the keynotes that followed, Anthropic and Sakana AI each spoke about the growth of AI from their own vantage point. Looking back on the rapid pace of partnerships in Japan over the past eight months — with AISI, NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Rakuten, and others — Anthropic offered the view that “the speed of progress can only move at the speed of trust.” The essence, in this framing, is not technological advance alone but building the foundation for society to accept it.
Sakana AI, by contrast, spoke from a different angle. Rather than building the single largest model, their idea is “model orchestration” — combining countless specialized models to arrive at the optimal answer. In the words “other AI companies are not competitors but comrades,” you could see a philosophy of strengthening the entire ecosystem rather than one company claiming the throne. Their point that not depending on a single provider becomes a strength — in cost and in supply chain alike — was thought-provoking for us as an AI company as well.
The panel discussion that followed carried the conversation further. Anthropic’s metaphor stuck with me: “developing AI is less like an orchestra playing from a score than like jazz.” You hold to your core principles while moving flexibly as the situation demands — a fixed roadmap simply can’t keep up with change of this exponential kind.
From Sakana AI came the line that “value is created precisely by placing yourself somewhere uncomfortable.” Deliberately standing in the space between the two cultures of the U.S. and Japan, they said, is what gives rise to a distinctive strength. From the investor side came the perspective that “the teams who can build what doesn’t yet exist in the world are the ones with the power to create a category.” It became a time to reconsider where AI stands today from each vantage point — technology, business, and investment.
Toyota Ventures and the “Sherpa” Model of Support
The last talk that left an impression was by Toyota Ventures. In Toyota’s transformation from “ever better cars” toward “mobility for all,” startups were positioned not merely as investment targets but as “Sherpas” for crossing the valley of uncertainty.
Their investment philosophy is not an either/or between strategic returns and financial returns, but aiming for the “unicorn Sherpa” that satisfies both. Alongside it came a governance principle: “independent, but never isolated.” Their framing of the evolution of robotics in three phases — the “programmed era,” the “era of learning by watching human movement,” and the “era of autonomous learning in a closed loop” — was a view that pointed toward the future ahead.
Toward Bringing Advanced Technology into Society
(Left) CEO Someda; (Right) Alex Hodges, a former HACARUS intern and Stanford University graduate
Looking back on the day, the themes were varied — the search for responsible AI, differentiation through specialization, growth as an ecosystem, and the philosophy of those who provide support. But running beneath all of them was, I think, a single question: how do we deliver the power of technology to society in a form that can be trusted? That runs through HACARUS’s mission as well.
Being selected as a Showcase company for the Japan-U.S. Innovation Awards 2026 was, in that context, a great encouragement. We could stand in this place only because of every member of the team who faces our customers’ challenges day after day and builds up steady improvements. I want to express, once again, my heartfelt thanks.
Listening to the other companies we met at the venue, what I felt was that we have only just arrived at the entrance to the challenge. As I also shared in my pitch: right now, in the midst of the great swell of physical AI, our role — not to treat it as a passing fad, but to implement and deliver it in products and services that are used as a matter of course at work sites around the world — is exactly what I felt it to be.
We’ll keep moving forward step by step — steadily, and swiftly.
