FLUX Inc., Japan’s leading AI platform developer, announced 4.4 billion JPY (approximately US$32 million) in Series B funding led by DNX Ventures, and including existing investor Archetype Ventures and new investors Japan Co-Investment, Aozora Corporate Investments, Salesforce Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, SMBC Nikko Securities, and NTT Docomo Ventures.
This additional funding brings FLUX’s total funds raised to 5.6 billion JPY (approximately US$40 million), and accelerates FLUX’s continued development of FLUX AI — a no-coding AI platform.
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Market Overview
FLUX AI allows businesses to easily leverage AI technologies such as predictive analytics, natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), without requiring any prior coding skills or knowledge.
In recent years, the business environment has been rapidly changing due to the emergence of AI technologies such as LLMs and generative AI. Despite these advancements, many companies in Japan struggle to adopt AI technologies into their businesses due to a lack of expertise and talent needed to understand and implement them. In order to tackle these challenges, FLUX has formed a team of experts to carry out in-depth research and service development within the AI technology field.
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No-code AI platform FLUX AI
FLUX AI is an AI platform that underpins several no-code solutions that allow businesses to easily incorporate AI technologies into their operations.
When developing solutions that include optimization or predictive analytics capabilities, it generally takes a significant amount of time and development cost to structure the available data in a way that the AI can use it. FLUX is able to efficiently develop AI-based solutions because every solution is built on the same FLUX AI architecture.
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FLUX collects over 100TB of data each month across its services, which are stored in a common database. Those data are used to train its models to increase performance for each service, while maintaining compliance with data governance best practices and privacy regulations.
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Over 1,100 publishers and advertisers are using FLUX services, with enterprise customers making up the largest customer segment. Throughout the past few years of rapid growth, the churn rate across FLUX services has stayed low at 0.2%, indicating strong customer satisfaction.
Growth strategy and use of funds
FLUX will leverage the funds raised for three primary purposes to fuel its continued growth in the Japanese B2B software market.
1. Enhancement of current products
FLUX AI’s applications today focus on digital advertising and marketing, with solutions for optimizing ad revenue, ad operations, and online audiences. Development will continue on each of these services to further improve their effectiveness and maximize ROI to customers. New features in development include the use of generative AI for marketing applications such as generating ad creatives and content. FLUX will continue to provide a range of services that help to solve various challenges within the advertising and marketing industry.
2. Horizontal expansion
FLUX aims to leverage the FLUX AI platform to bring the benefits of AI to functions beyond advertising and marketing. There are many other business functions which could be made simpler or more efficient through leveraging AI, and FLUX will continue to develop simple solutions for its clients to increase productivity and decrease operational costs.
3. AI research
Since its founding, FLUX has conducted research on AI technologies ranging from predictive analytics to NLP and LLMs. The Series B funding will accelerate these research efforts as well as enabling hiring of more AI engineers.
Series B participants
– Existing investors : DNX Ventures, Archetype Ventures
– New investors: Japan Co-Investment, Aozora Corporate Investments, Salesforce Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, SMBC Nikko Securities, and NTT Docomo Ventures
– Debt financing: Resona Bank, Shoko Chukin Bank
