Businesses are drowning in video they never watch. Store cameras, broadcast archives, production footage - petabytes of it sits unused on servers, becoming what the industry calls dark data. Now two former Google Japan executives think they've cracked the code on making it useful. InfiniMind, their Tokyo-based startup, just raised $5.8 million to build AI infrastructure that converts massive video libraries into searchable, queryable business intelligence - and they're already processing 200-hour video archives for enterprise customers.
The numbers tell the story: by 2025, video already makes up over 80% of all consumer internet traffic, according to industry research. But for enterprises, most of that footage becomes what technologists call dark data - information collected automatically but never analyzed or used. InfiniMind co-founder and CEO Aza Kai saw this problem firsthand during nearly a decade at Google Japan, where he worked across cloud, machine learning, ad systems, and video recommendation models.
"My co-founder, who spent a decade leading brand and data solutions at Google Japan, and I saw this inflection point coming while we were still at Google," Kai told TechCrunch. By 2024, the technology had matured enough that Kai and COO Hiraku Yanagita left to build the solution themselves.
The Tokyo-based startup just closed a $5.8 million seed round led by UTEC, with participation from CX2, Headline Asia, Chiba Dojo, and an AI researcher at a16z Scout. The funding validates InfiniMind's bet that enterprises are ready to unlock decades of archived video - if the technology can actually handle the scale and complexity.
What changed wasn't just falling GPU costs, though annual performance gains of 15-20% over the past decade helped. The real breakthrough came from vision-language models between 2021 and 2023. Earlier video AI could tag objects in individual frames, but it couldn't track narratives, understand causality, or answer complex questions about content. For clients with petabytes of broadcast archives, even basic questions went unanswered.
