Miku Hirano

Miku Hirano founded her first company, Naked Technology, at twenty-two. While completing her master’s at the University of Tokyo, she was convinced that AI and data were about to change everything.

Naked Technology developed mobile middleware for iOS, Android, and feature phones. In 2011, mixi acquired it. Before that, Hirano was selected twice for Japan’s IPA Exploratory Software Creation Initiative — a national programme identifying the country’s most exceptional engineering talent.

Years later, when Hirano was pregnant with her first child, a young Japanese office worker died by suicide from overwork. She had studied at the same university as Hirano, and the news shook her. Hirano looked at the work culture around her, then at the child she was about to bring into it. She decided something had to change and Cinnamon AI was born out of that conviction.

Today, Cinnamon AI builds enterprise AI for unstructured documents. Its flagship products, FlexScanner and Super RAG, process complex, non-templated documents at accuracy and scale that most systems cannot match. Banks, insurers, and healthcare providers rely on Cinnamon to eliminate the manual, repetitive work consuming their operations. In 2019, Forbes named Cinnamon one of the 25 Machine Learning Startups to Watch.

Beyond the product, Hirano built Cinnamon’s R&D base in Vietnam. She identifies deep pools of mathematically gifted engineers and trains them from first principles. That rigour has not gone unnoticed. Forbes Japan named her a Top 10 Entrepreneur. She received the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award New Generation prize and in 2022, the World Economic Forum selected her as a Young Global Leader.

Inside Japan’s government, she advises on economic and fiscal policy councils under three successive prime ministers and chairs METI’s Industrial Policy Study Group for the Realisation of a Resilient Society. She sits on the Advisory Board of the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Engineering and serves as Outside Director of JGC Holdings Corporation.

She is also the founder of Kamui Whisky, a craft distillery on the remote island of Rishiri.

Miku Hirano speaks about AI without hype. Japan may trail the US and China in overall AI investment, yet it leads in business AI — the unglamorous, high-stakes work of processing documents, structuring knowledge, and removing friction from enterprise operations. She knows this space better than almost anyone. Her argument is straightforward: people spend too much time on work that machines can do. That time belongs to them. AI exists to give it back. At Cinnamon, organising knowledge is not just a product feature. It is the precondition for human intention to become human action.