Kotoba Technologies, headquartered in Tokyo (with a Seattle presence), develops Japanese-centric large language models and speech AI for real-time simultaneous interpretation, speech-to-speech translation and transcription. The company's roots trace to a project building a Japanese LLM on the Fugaku supercomputer. It has shipped Kotoba SpeechGen and the DOTSU iOS app, which performs live speech-to-speech translation with transcription. In June 2025 Kotoba closed a second seed round of $11.83 million (≈¥1.7 billion), bringing total seed funding to about $13.33 million. The round was led by Globis Capital Partners and Boost Capital, with SIP Capital and angels including Joi Ito (co-founder of Digital Garage) and Thomas Wolf (co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face) participating, to accelerate commercialization of its interpretation technology.