RECERQA

RECERQA Inc. is a Japanese startup founded in April 2022 by CEO Shotaro Umeda, with Momoka Koda as a co-founder and director. The company develops the "RECERQA Series," a smart Supply Chain Management (SCM) SaaS platform designed to modernize and simplify purchasing, inventory, and sales management. The mission is to address longstanding inefficiencies in the SCM sector, an area the founders believe has been largely overlooked by recent SaaS advancements. Umeda's direct experience with the complexities of SCM through his role at an Italian motorcycle import business, which he later acquired, served as a primary catalyst for the company's creation.

The core of RECERQA's offering is a generative AI-powered platform that aims to eliminate the need for extensive manuals or specialized knowledge to operate. It resolves the traditional trade-off between systems that are either feature-rich but complex, or easy to use but lacking in comprehensive functionality. The platform consists of several solutions, including "RECERQA Hub," a master data management (MDM) system, and "RECERQA Scan," an AI-Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service. RECERQA Hub serves as a central database for all business data, structured to be 'AI-Ready' for immediate analysis and utilization. RECERQA Scan specializes in converting unstructured documents like invoices, delivery notes, and receipts into structured data without requiring pre-set templates or coordinate specifications. This AI-OCR tool can handle various non-standard formats and even provides features like summarization and translation.

The company's business model is subscription-based, targeting a wide range of clients from small businesses to large enterprises in industries such as trading, manufacturing, retail, and healthcare. RECERQA makes money by providing its suite of SCM tools that digitize analog data, automate processes, and offer advanced analytics through natural language queries. The company has engaged in several partnerships and proof-of-concept projects, including with the Ibaraki Prefectural Government and Nippon Steel Trading Corporation, to demonstrate its technology's effectiveness. RECERQA has secured funding from investors including Genesia Ventures and New Commerce Ventures, raising a total of $1.1M as of September 2024 to enhance its development and marketing efforts.

Keywords: supply chain management, generative AI, SCM SaaS, AI-OCR, master data management, business process automation, inventory management, sales management, purchasing management, data digitization, unstructured data processing, RECERQA Scan, RECERQA Hub, enterprise software, operational efficiency, document automation, workflow automation, business intelligence, data analytics, invoice processing