Publisher Kodansha, broadcaster TBS, and animation studio Toei Animation are among the parties that contributed to the latest funding round of Preferred Networks, Inc., a company that was established in 2014 to “develop practical, real-world applications of deep learning, robotics and other advanced technologie.”
Preferred Networks announced today (April 30 JST) that it had raised another five billion yen (~US$35 million) from this extension round, bringing its total so far to 24 billion yen (~US$168.3 million). It says that it “intends to invest the amount raised in development and provision of competitive AI technologies while leveraging its strength in the vertical integration of AI semiconductors, computing infrastructure, generative AI foundation models and AI solutions.” The first funding round in December 2024 raised 19 billion yen.
The announcement included the following investor statements:
Kodansha (via President Yoshinobu Noma)
“Since the founding, Kodansha has delivered a variety of content to the world while balancing interesting and beneficial storytelling. Today, we are advancing digital transformation in content production in parallel with global expansion. It is truly reassuring to have joined forces under a capital and business tie-up with Preferred Networks, Japan’s representative cutting-edge technology company. We look forward to combining Preferred Networks’s [sic] advanced technologies with Kodansha’s editorial capacity and ideas to expand horizons of our content, thereby inspiring people around the world through our storytelling.”
TBS (via executive officer Susumu Okuda)
“With our belief that remarkable evolution of AI technologies can bring major changes to the future of entertainment, we have invested in Preferred Networks, Japan’s leading company in the AI space, through TBS Innovation Partners. By cross-breeding Preferred Networks’s [sic] world-class AI technologies and our long-proven expertise in content creation, we will strive to create unprecedented, innovative visual expressions and bring efficiency to video production processes.”
Toei Animation (via senior director Kiichiro Yamada)
“At Toei Animation, we expect that Preferred Networks’s strengths in technology, development and organization will play a key role in Japan’s future. We believe that the combination of their strengths and our long-proven anime production expertise will create strong synergies. Going forward, we will strive to achieve sustainable growth with Preferred Networks and contribute to the overall development of Japan’s anime industry.”
Preferred Networks, or PFN, is involved in areas like “transportation, manufacturing, life sciences, robots, plant optimization, materials discovery, education and entertainment.” It developed the open-source deep learning framework Chainer in 2015 and released the open-source large language model PLaMo-13B in 2023.
In 2021, it was announced that PFN and Toei Animation had teamed up to “jointly conducted trials on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to streamline production of anime.” This collaboration resulted in the application of an AI-powered background tool called Scenify, which “uses PFN’s AI-based image processing and segmentation technologies,” for the six-minute experimental short URVAN.
Source: Preferred Networks (via @animationbiz_jp)
