Knowledge Work raises ¥3.5 bn and partners with Ricoh Japan to expand AI sales platform

Japanese startup Knowledge Work announced a Series C financing round that closed with a ¥3.5 billion third‑party allotment, bringing in investors such as Ricoh Japan, Canon Marketing Japan, NTT Docomo Ventures, Mitsui Sumitomo Bank and others. The company also launched its Sales AI Agent OS, a four‑layer AI foundation designed to organize sales data, embed strategy, manage agents and provide user interfaces for enterprise sales teams.

In a related move, Knowledge Work and Ricoh Japan signed a capital‑business alliance to jointly promote AI‑driven sales‑force transformation. The partnership will combine Ricoh's customer base of roughly one million businesses with Knowledge Work's AI sales solutions, co‑develop new offerings, and integrate AI‑generated meeting transcripts with Ricoh's kintone platform. An AI meeting‑record product is slated for release in 2026, aiming to automate transcription, summarisation and reporting for sales staff.