 Hi everyone, my name is Shin Sakane and I'm CEO and founder of Seven Dreamers and we are the technologists that Creating what the world has never seen meaning that that we want to make real innovations Not fake innovations So what we value is technology in life Meaning that we are more B2C like consumer products company than B2B and For us the most important thing to make innovations is how to pick a theme So we have three criteria When I when we pick a theme one is new things the world has never seen the second is that Something to improve people's life. The third thing is something very very difficult to develop so in order to To meet these criterias we do not care What the business field is what the technology resources we have? We really don't care and pick good themes and we have three different completely different project themes We have but today I want to talk about one of the probably the most famous product that we have which is Landroid Landroid is the world first laundry folding robot and and We started this technology development back in 2005. So Last 13 years. We've been working on this spending over 50 million US dollars investment into R&D And we are about to launch a product next year. We're gonna start shipping so from The with a research company we found that people in a lifetime in the ordinary household people spend more than 18,000 hours for laundry work and a half of them which is 9,000 hours are spent for After clothes are dried which is folding and separating and then storing into clothes it which is about 375 days That is more than a little more than one year of people's like light in lifetime So in order to automate this laundry folding process We want to liberate people from folding work and then create more valuable time valuable time for people's life. That's the goal so Landroid is Like a little bit like a big box like refrigerator So you insert? up to 20 to 30 clothes into an insert box at the bottom and then after that you just start the machine and a you know multiple robot arms pick up each item at the time and then with AI and visual analysis technologies and fold and then separate and into You know pick up trade So Landroid technology consists of three different technologies including image analysis artificial intelligence and robotics and Landroid takes like five steps to fold each item Picking up spilling out and recognize and then fold and sort in the stack in these five processes Image analysis technologies are used all the five processes and then out of five four processes use artificial intelligence So this is one of the example is how we use AI In order to recognize this like item is a long-sleeved t-shirt for example In order to be able to for Landroid to be able to recognize we need for example about 256,000 images as a training data if it's 110th like 25,000 images recognition rate is still 75% but when we have over 200,000 images we have recognition rate is about 95% we use deep learning with this a lot of like bunch of data training set So Landroid only works under Wi-Fi connected circumstances, which is kind of like IoT device So Landroid software inside is keep updated Like you know very frequently and make it faster and a more precise folding to achieve So Landroid Falls most of the daily clothing including short sleeve pants room wear pajamas and towels And there are two different convenient convenient sorting mode default model is sort by item type You don't need to do any registration process or anything It does separate into you know each clothing categories another convenient function is sort by person This is for mother father and kids and stuff like that So Landroid is definitely the machine and robot to do very troublesome work for you And also Landroid can manage your wardrobe In on their Landroid app you can check what kind of clothing you have and How often you wear or how often you did not wear the clothes? So you can manage your your clothes online and we have a partnership with a fashion tech startups So even like Landroid app can provide you a better coordinate for you so a Lot of people suspect that someone is in the box. So which is not true So this is to prove that robot arms are actually folding So the bottom robot arm pickup one item at a time and then using vision analysis and AI technology calculations It tried to recognize what kind of clothing that is now it's not possible because it's still that the shape is not clear So multiple robot arms has to expand to see what it is So finally once it's expanded I can tell oh, this is t-shirt and then even though In addition it has to know if the front or back Upside down and measure the width and length and then decide where to fold where which line to fold and once it's recognized and start folding and And In order to fold it you can require is about 30 AI calculations. So it's really AI intensive robot and then eventually Put it in the pickup tray like this Okay, so we've been working on this for last 13 years, but back in 2015 which is about two and a half years ago We had a we signed a contract with Panasonic and I was house for the further product development of the the final stage of product development They're the also biggest in bit one of the biggest two of the biggest investors of us and since we are In one year from now that we are going to actually start shipping Landroid So a lot of people want to experience Landroid how it's like So we opened the Landroid cafe and a gallery in Omotesando Tokyo in central Tokyo and also we Opened the demo area in San Francisco called in the co-working space So this is a kind of history of the Landroid. We started development back in 2005 and then after 10 years We developed the world first completely automatic Landry folding robot And then next year the year after we had a you know contract We signed a contract with Panasonic and I was house and then year later. We established a joint venture and Now it's about to launch the product So by challenging this kind of things finally we get kind of lucky we get Japan Venture Award for innovation prize and Then we became the regional championship of Japan in Japan for the startup World Cup Which will be held in in May this year So what we want to do is we want to become the world's most innovative company And then I bring you know great technology and products to the world So let me a little bit talk about like our background like our passion for innovations. I strongly believe that Technology making makes the world a happier place Some people say it's like AI or robot will take over people's like jobs Which is really bad, but I don't think so they always technology bring happiness to the people and I'm Driving innovations innovation is not a easy things to make it's so hard now Nowadays everybody in the world want to make innovations and real innovation doesn't happen, you know very often So then why how how we can make innovations the most important thing For innovations. I believe is to how to find a theme a lot of people have past success or Resources technology resources they have they stuck with it so they cannot come up with the new ideas new great themes So very important thing is to forget about what you have what kind of technology you already have What kind of success you already have forget about it you have to find a theme Which is something very very new no one has ever done before and you have to work hard to find it Do the patent search and article search and then try if you find one article or one patent Just get rid of this theme, you know You have to find something that no one has ever done before that's a key and Then once you find a theme next thing is defined the very very Clear goal you have you we want to develop this kind of product this shape and then buy when and Then last thing is never give up if you try something really new if you want to really try to make real innovations A lot of people's for some reason try to stop you. Maybe it's only in Japan I don't know if I try to do something very strange, you know I try to make a completely fully automatic laundry folding robot Maybe hundreds of people try to stop me. Oh you stupid you're gonna fail for sure You know that's not gonna happen, you know technology is so difficult like don't even try Somehow people try to stop me, but you have to keep trying and never give up So there are many many hurdles barriers for startups like especially hardware startup like us There are few things that we really need like people talented engineers Time is always limited and the funding but among these three the toughest one is funding So Hardware startup is a very very high risk Business, but once we succeed the growth will be tremendous. So initial investment is a lot So we got to find really good partners investors. So Fortunately, we have already very very good partners investors, but initially it was very hard Summer in 2014 we are almost broke In mid-August Within two weeks who he didn't raise three million dollars. We were out broke completely But finally one great investor supported us and then we survived and since then we've raised over 100 US million dollars We are very fortunate about it, but we had to work very very hard on it And then once you set a goal very very like high goal You get you definitely meet difficulties all the time I think difficulty comes to everyone in the world, but especially when you have a very very high goal you You know happen to you face or difficulties more often than other people But you have to just keep working on it keep overcoming the problems then Eventually if you survive if we survive we will be people called. We are successful company Okay very Interesting things that I've been thinking about is now Landroid team is the biggest team in my company and we have about 60 Engineers internally and then a little bit less than 10 engineers from Panasonic working together it's about 70 people's like big team and Then a lot of people think that our teams Team members are relatively young energetic very smart and you know fighting all the time But trying to create something new that's the kind of the team that people think of but actually our Maybe 40 people out of 60 in our internal engineers are Over 50 years old Japanese ma'am There are a couple young, you know people and a couple foreigners Working together, but maybe close to 40 people are older Japanese engineers who we call Oji-san in Japanese So if you open the door of a Landroid lab, it will be surprised. Oh my gosh. It's a old man's spell, you know Oh my gosh, but what we found is these old engineers are mostly from Japanese major Electronics companies like Sony Panasonic Hitachi Toshiba sharp and stuff like that and then when I first So they're you know correct that get rid of me I was so surprised like they they're educated so well and they have great experiences in Miga enterprises in Japan And why why now they want to you know work for a startup company like us? But what they what we found is when they were young like 20 when they just started their career in a big company Japan was one of the greatest place for innovations like Sony Invented Walkman and a lot of home appliances always came from Japan So they're very excited to make innovations in the big company But after a couple years they found the world competition became so high And what they need to develop is something better quality at cheaper price So that was not like exciting You know technology development for them for a long long time and then after they became 50 They they saw our news that this crazy company seven dreamers have been developing laundry folding robot Which no one has ever done before and then they couldn't stop You know applying for us and then they came to us and now last couple years those Oddy sounds like all Japanese engineers are the ones who are really really making innovations They they brought this you know dream come true so what I think is You know people think that the recently Japan no longer making innovations, you know some Japanese people thinking that way or people from overseas thinking that way But I I can tell it's not true their unbelievable number of smart engineers are in this country and All you need to do is to find a good thing Once you find a great thing and then if there is a someone who said, okay, let's do it Let's make it happen Then there are so many talented engineers in this country So I believe that Japan can still make innovations and then we can bring Innovations to the world. So that's what I've been thinking recently And we are trying to prove that and then we will try to become the world number one innovative company in the near future Thank you very much