On 15 May 2026, Fast Accounting, an Enterprise AI Company specializing in the accounting field that provides an integrated offering from the digitization of accounting documents to the automation of judgment through AI agents, announced its results for Q1 (January-March) FY12/2026. Riding the structural tailwind of a shortage of accounting personnel, the Company is expanding its value proposition beyond its conventional OCR and automation domain into “Steward,” an AI product that handles judgment-based tasks. In other words, the Company has effectively positioned as an accounting platform provider for the AI agent era. In Q1 (January-March), the Company achieved substantial increases in sales and profit from the same period of the previous year, while the progress rate against the full-year Company forecast reached 42.6% for operating profit. According to the Company, in addition to sales growth for large corporate clients, the Company is steadily building a stable revenue base, while both the maintenance and improvement of a high gross profit margin and the restraint of increases in SG&A expenses have been achieved. As a specific growth driver looking ahead, the mandatory application of the new lease accounting standard from April 2027 has been cited. The Company expects the monetization of related demand to begin in earnest in the latter half of 2026, and the Company anticipates a further expansion of large-client projects driven by this regulatory change.

Cypress Holdings, which aims to drive growth in the everyday dining-out market, has historically operated directly managed stores across 36 brands—including the seafood restaurant “Tsukiji Shokudo GEN-CHAN”—primarily in suburban shopping centers. More recently, however, the Company has adopted a policy of accelerating its growth potential through the diversification of store formats. Under a management strategy that places strong emphasis on free cash flow generation, the Company has leveraged its stable procurement capabilities, highly profitable store operations and close relationships with developers (operators and managers of shopping centers such as AEON Mall) to efficiently expand its directly managed store network. At the same time, the Company has begun promoting franchise development for the charcoal-grilled yakitori takeout “Ginza Souzaiten” which operates with low capital requirements and high capital efficiency. While directly managed stores will continue to serve as a platform for enhancing brand value and refining operational expertise in pursuit of further profit growth, franchise expansion is expected to add new revenue streams through royalties and franchise fees on top of earnings generated from company-operated stores. As a result, the Company appears to be positioning itself to steadily enhance its medium- to long-term growth profile. In other words, the Company is establishing new sources of earnings while keeping capital investment and human resource allocation to a minimum. Meanwhile, in the case of the seafood restaurant “Tsukiji Shokudo GEN-CHAN,” the Company has already secured one roadside location—representing a new type of site for the brand—as part of its directly managed store rollout strategy. This initiative is also expected to contribute to the diversification of store formats.

On 14 May 2026, uSonar, which operates as a "specialized trading company for corporate data", announced its results for Q1 (January–March) FY12/2026. It has become clear that the Company, which treats one of Japan's largest corporate master databases as an asset, or the source that generates earnings, is positioned to continue growing on the back of tailwinds from generative AI. As the use of generative AI advances, the Company appears to be steadily establishing its position as an infrastructure company that provides not "applications that are used" but "data infrastructure that is referenced". High-quality data is indispensable for the effective use of generative AI. The Company has strengths built on years of manual data collection and verification, as well as the accumulation of corporate data that includes historical changes in companies, and by combining these strengths with generative AI, it is building a highly competitive database that is difficult for peers to replicate. As client companies move ahead with the introduction of generative AI and AI agents, demand is increasing for the normalization, entity resolution (reducing duplicate data) and continuous updating of the corporate databases that underpin such adoption, and inquiries for the Company continue to increase. While we plan to obtain further details through interviews with the Company's management, we are also planning to newly launch and publish a "Company Report" on the Company in light of the content.