NANKAI NEXT Ventures Invests in Shumitime Operator Jellness
The investment is a bet on an operator that treats generative AI as back-office machinery for personalizing leisure tours, not as the product itself, and on a leisure business angling toward broader everyday-life services.
Reporting from 1 source: ASCII.jp.
NANKAI NEXT Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of NANKAI Co., Ltd., has invested in Jellness Co., Ltd., a Tokyo startup that runs Shumitime, a small-group community leisure service for people in their 60s and 70s. The company plans and operates its experience tours in-house and uses generative AI on contextual data such as user conversations and participation history to tailor experience proposals.
Jellness runs Shumitime under the vision of creating a world where people can enjoy life to the fullest. Its tours are planned and operated in-house, and anyone can join alone. The company says its own approach feeds contextual data, including users' conversations and participation history, into operations through generative AI so that experience proposals match individual preferences.
The stated next steps are an expansion into the Kansai area, the launch of Shumitime Gift, a service for gifting experiences, and a move from leisure into the wider daily life domain.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.