Almondo: a first-year student, a professor's lab and a corporate AI shop

Kota Ito is not a computer scientist by training. At the University of Tokyo he is in the humanities track, and the subject that interests him is cultural anthropology. In February 2023, in his first year, he founded an AI company.

A lab as a launch pad

Almondo is a spinout of Matsuo Lab, the University of Tokyo research group led by the AI researcher Yutaka Matsuo, who serves as the company’s technical advisor. Ito, who attended Nada High School, founded it in the winter of his first year, according to Toyo Keizai Online and PRESIDENT Online.

Toyo Keizai’s profile from December 2023 describes a company of roughly 30 staff, most of them University of Tokyo students who also work at a Matsuo Lab AI research firm. PRESIDENT Online, writing two months earlier, put the team at 12 to 13 people. The articles do not explain the gap, and neither figure comes from the company’s accounts.

What it sells

Almondo builds custom AI for large Japanese companies. Its own recruitment page lists engagements including AI verification work for a major game company, development of domain-specific language models, workflow efficiency for a major food manufacturer, and demand forecasting for a major infrastructure company. It names no products and no clients. The page describes the company’s aim as to be an engineer-led “planning group”, rather than only a fast-growing development shop.

The company also says it grew at an average of 200 to 300 per cent a year in its first two-plus years. That is Almondo’s own claim and unaudited. In December 2024 it announced a capital and business alliance with Tender Co., a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Standard market, with the aim of linking Tender’s client base to Almondo’s AI implementation work. The two companies share an office floor in Shibuya.

The founder

Ito’s route was not straightforward. PRESIDENT Online reports that, before university, he spent about a year withdrawn and unsure what he wanted to do. He has said that he took part-time jobs to research markets. His stated academic interest is how entrepreneurship forms when immigrants start businesses abroad.

On the support he had, Ito told Toyo Keizai (translated here from the Japanese): “I’ve reached where I am today supported not only by Professor Matsuo personally, but also by the startup ecosystem that Matsuo Lab has.”

Why it matters

Almondo is a test of a claim that is often made about Japanese students: that the best of them no longer see a large company as the default destination. Here, the case rests on a particular structure. A famous lab supplies advisors, early clients and a pool of student engineers, and a first-year student supplies the company. It is a repeatable template only for people who already sit at the right university, in the right lab.

What the public record does not yet show is outside funding beyond the Tender alliance, or revenue. For now, Almondo is best read as an early marker of how Matsuo Lab turns a laboratory’s relationships into companies, and how young the people running them can be.