Businesses are creating more videos than ever before. From years of archived broadcasts to thousands of shop cameras and countless hours of production footage, most of it is just sitting unused on servers, unobservable and analyzable. This is dark data: a vast, untapped resource that companies collect automatically but almost never use in a meaningful way.
To address the problem, Aza Kai (CEO) and Hiraku Yanagita (COO), two former Googlers who spent nearly a decade working together at Google Japan, decided to create their own solution. The duo co-founded InfiniMinda Tokyo-based startup developing infrastructure that turns petabytes of unviewed video and audio into searchable structured business data.
“My co-founder, who spent a decade leading brand and data solutions at Google Japan, and I saw this turning point coming while we were still at Google,” Kai said. By 2024, the technology had matured and the market demand had become clear enough that the co-founders felt compelled to start the company themselves, he added.
Kai, who previously worked at Google Japan on cloud models, machine learning, ad systems and video recommendations and later led data science teams, explained that current solutions force a trade-off. Previous approaches could tag objects in individual frames, but they couldn’t track narratives, understand causality, or answer complex questions about video content. For customers with decades of broadcast archives and petabytes of footage, even basic questions about their content often went unanswered.
What really changed was the advancement in vision language models between 2021 and 2023. That’s when video AI started to move beyond just tagging objects, Kai noted. Falling GPU costs and annual performance gains of about 15% to 20% over the past decade have helped, but the bigger story has been capacity—until recently, the models just couldn’t do the job, he told TechCrunch.
InfiniMind recently secured $5.8 million in seed funding, led by UTEC and joined by CX2, Headline Asia, Chiba Dojo and an AI researcher at a16z Scout. The company is moving its headquarters to the US, while continuing to operate an office in Japan. Japan provided the perfect test bed: powerful hardware, talented engineers, and a supportive startup ecosystem; allowing the team to adapt its technology with demanding customers before going global.
Its first product, TV Pulse, launched in Japan in April 2025. The AI-powered platform analyzes TV content in real-time, helping media and retail companies “monitor product exposure, brand presence, customer sentiment and PR impact,” per the startup. After pilot programs with major broadcasters and agencies, it already has paying customers including wholesalers and media companies.
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Now, InfiniMind is ready for the international market. Its flagship product, DeepFrame, a large-format video intelligence platform capable of processing 200 hours of footage to identify specific scenes, speakers or events, is scheduled to be released in beta in March, followed by a full release in April 2026, Kai said.
The video analytics space is very fragmented. Companies like TwelveLabs provide general-purpose video understanding APIs for a wide range of users, including consumers, vendors and enterprises, Kai said, while InfiniMind focuses specifically on enterprise use cases such as surveillance, security, safety and video content analysis for deeper insights.
“Our solution requires no code; customers bring their data and our system processes it, providing actionable insights,” said Kai. “We also integrate audio, audio and speech understanding, not just visuals. Our system can handle unlimited video length, and cost efficiency is a major differentiator. Most existing solutions prioritize accuracy or specific use cases, but don’t solve cost challenges.”
The seed funding will help the team continue to develop the DeepFrame model, expand the engineering infrastructure, hire more engineers, and reach additional customers across Japan and the US
“This is an exciting space, one of the paths to AGI,” Kai said. “Understanding general video intelligence is about understanding reality. Industrial applications are important, but our ultimate goal is to push the boundaries of technology to better understand reality and help people make better decisions.”
