tokyo
(4)
IPPO Wants Your Next Office to Come With a Past
The Tokyo broker helps startups inherit offices instead of paying to strip them out and build them again. The clever part is getting the departing tenant, the new tenant and the landlord to agree.
DMM Quit Robots. Now It’s Putting ¥5 Billion Into a Return.
Anime, currency trading, English lessons and an aquarium already share the DMM name. Its return to robotics reveals how this Japanese conglomerate decides which failures deserve another chance.
Nikon Spent a Century Perfecting Light. Now It Is Betting the Company on Everything Except Cameras.
The camera brand your grandparents trusted now etches microchips, prints jet parts in metal, and photographs living cells. In 2026 that pivot is running at a loss - and Nikon says that is the point.
Integral AI
Integral AI is a Japan-US startup building foundation world models - AI systems meant to learn, plan, and act in the real world the way people do, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and continuous, autonomous skill learning. Founded in 2021 by ex-Google AI leaders Jad Tarifi and Nima Asgharbeygi, the company positions its interactive world models as infrastructure for an AI-based economy, spanning robotics, universal simulators, and multimodal interfaces. In December 2025 it made headlines by claiming to have tested the world's first AGI-capable model, TOWA.