Members

Born in 1983, from Tokyo After graduating from Keio University, he worked at a foreign owned investment bank, as an investment and M&A advisor for publicly listed companies, and then experienced working abroad at a brokerage firm. His TOEIC score was 280 points when he first joined the company, and he struggled to achieve the level of English he needed to succeed at work, which led him to developing the products and services that SpeakBUDDY currently offers. He is the youngest person to have passed the level 2 Certified Public Accountant's exam.

He graduated and got his Master's Degree from the University of Tokyo. After serving as a special research fellow in graduate school, he worked in system development and consulting roles at multiple venture companies. While working as a contractor at SpeakBUDDY in 2018, he felt the future potential of AI and the potential of startup companies to change society, so he joined SpeakBUDDY as a fulltime member in 2019 as the COO. Since 2023, he has also become a board member and is in charge of overseeing both the product and administration sectors of the company.

He joined Itochu Corporation, then Property Risk Solution Co., Ltd. (Deloitte Tohmatsu PRS Co., Ltd. at the time), followed by Farmot Co. Ltd. (Currently Nagaoya Co. Ltd.), and Shinwa Energy, before founding the company IKIGAI. He is also the managing director of the Meiwa Estate Company Ltd. He does many different things such as investing in companies, supporting executives, supporting business development, and much more. He graduated from Keio University's business school. He is currently one of speakBUDDY's independent directors.

After graduating from the economics department of Chuo University, he experienced a wide range of roles in accounting, finance, and IR, in several publicly listed corporations. He took an interest in the SpeakBUDDY app and applied for the company because he felt that he still needed to develop his own English ability. After meeting our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi, and the CFO at the time in interviews, he felt that he could really trust the executives at the company, and wanted to work with the other members to make the company mission a reality. He joined the company in April of 2021. Since then, he has been in charge of the back office overall (including accounting, compliance, and general affairs).

After working in sales for a large securities corporation, he transferred to the IT industry, and experienced releasing over 20 app's on the App Store that reached number 1. After that, he worked as the PdM for "Pairs" at Eureka. Around the time that he found out about the SpeakBuddy app and was impressed by its UX, our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi reached out to him and since "education" was one of the themes that he thought he would like to commit his time to longterm, he joined our company in October of 2021. He is currently the PdM for the AI x Language Learning SpeakBuddy App.

After graduating from Meiji University's Literature Department, he started to develop an interest in Technology x Something Else while he served as the project manager and CMO for the development of a new business at a company in the AI field. At the time, while he was thinking that the "something else" might be education or sports, our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi reached out to him and he learned that our service combined technology with Language Learning and he decided to join our company in December of 2021. He is in charge of both the Business and Marketing Divisions at the company.

After graduating from Keio University, he joined Recruit Group in sales and later served as a business director. He also led efforts to build the organization and hire for a new IT startup business.He gained experience setting up a subsidiary and serving as a hiring manager at SoldOut. His first encounter with a language barrier came when he started a new business in China, experiencing firsthand the difficulties of learning a new language. He was attracted to the open and humble company atmosphere at SpeakBUDDY and joined the company in December of 2021. He is in charge of the HR Division.

After graduating from Hitotsubashi University, she joined Link and Motivation Inc. After working as a organizational HR consultant, she engaged in work as a PR, service planner, and media relations expert for EC and Media businesses. When she was a child, her father worked overseas in the US and she felt an interest in different languages and cultures, but also experienced setbacks related to these things many times. After her own child was born, she felt a renewed desire to acquire another language, in order to expand her own opportunities and choices in life, and joined SpeakBUDDY in 2022. She is in charge of communications and PR for SpeakBUDDY.

After graduating from Waseda University, he worked at a specialized trading company, and then got experience being a manager in the sales divisions of SaaS Industry companies like Sansan, Salesforce, and Commune. He felt that he wanted to take up the challenge at a startup company again, and wanted to create the best company that would be known around the world with his own hands. He also felt that he wanted to be involved in creating the culture and product, and after having discussions with over 30 domestic and foreign owned companies, he joined our company in March of 2023. Since then, he has been advancing the growth of the Corporate Business division.

He graduated from the department of science and engineering at Keio University with a degree in information engineering in physics. After graduating, he joined Recruit as a web marketer, and then worked as a product manager and product owner after that. He was in charge of strategy planning and deciding the overall business direction, and pushed forward many initiatives that were the first of their kind in the industry, securing a lot of business patents in the process. Since he was young, he had the opportunity to meet people from overseas, and was well aware of the necessity of English, while admiring it at the same time. His wish is that people won't be swayed one way or the other by the environment that they are born into, and that those who work hard will be rewarded, so he joined SpeakBUDDY in February of 2024 as a Corporate Planner.

Originally from Australia, he studied graphic design, and the worked as a UI/UX designer for one of Australia's top design firms. He has over 10 years of experience with web and app design. In October, 2016 he became a freelance designer at the company, and then joined officially in January of 2017. Now he is the design lead at SpeakBUDDY and works on UI and UX design, as well as product design and illustration.

After graduating from the University of Tsukuba and while studying at the Graduate School of Tsukuba, he studied English by himself and then went on a study abroad program to Switzerland and also studied Italian. After that, he joined a research company and then Rakuten, and had an interest in creating an original product or service. Around that time, our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi reached out to him and he joined SpeakBUDDY in August of 2017. Now, he is heavily involved in development as our Engineering Lead. At the same time, he also helps with hiring and management of our development team that includes many international developers.

While he was a student at Hosei University's Applied Information and Engineering Department, he specialized in programming, and wanted to get more hands on experience, so he joined SpeakBUDDY as an intern in 2016. After graduating from university in April of 2018, he became a full time member of the company. On top of deploying features to the app, he took part in the early digital marketing activities at the company, handling everything from strategy to execution, and also contributed greatly to the product strategy as well. Now, he is leading the implementation of important features for the app as an iOS engineer, as well as leading growth and user analysis activities.

After graduating from Waseda University, she was in corporate sales at a publishing company as a new grad. After that, she lent a hand to many companies as a freelance writer and back office support. In 2014, as a contract worker, she came across SpeakBUDDY (appArray at the time), and was moved by how easily and effectively she could study English through an app. After that, she assisted the company in many areas and was involved in starting up SpeakBUDDY's Personal Coaching business. While hoping to have as many people as possible experience the same feelings about our products that she had felt, she joined SpeakBUDDY as a full time member in 2020.

After graduating from Meiji Gakuin University, she joined GABA. She was in charge of operating English schools and training programs geared towards corporations inside of over 2000 corporations and government agencies. While supporting the efforts of many Japanese people to learn English through that work, she learned about SpeakBUDDY and thought that by using technology, we can make language acquisition more efficient and enable even more people to acquire language ability, so she joined the company in February of 2021. She is now active as one of SpeakBUDDY's corporate customer success managers.

After graduating from Meiji Gakuin University, he worked as a project manager at companies like Netyear Group or Branding Technology Inc. He began to want to experience a job that was somehow connected to English or working overseas, since he had experience traveling solo to India and Thailand in college, and had done a study abroad program in New Zealand, and joined SpeakBUDDY in June of 2021. He is working on SpeakBUDDY's English Study Q&A Service and other Web related projects at the company.

She graduated from the Psychology and Sociology department of the University of Tokyo with a specialized degree in sociology. After working in sales at a foreign owned ad agency, she was in charge of the marketing planning and strategy for a large BtoC corporation. Since she was a student, she loved languages, and wanted to work overseas, but while she lived in China and studying Chinese from scratch, she rediscovered the joy of learning languages again. She always felt a keen interest in being involved with a service in the language learning sector, and was considering working with a service that was considering overseas expansion, when she came across SpeakBUDDY and joined us in May of 2022.

He graduated from the law department of Rikkyo University. He came across the development environment Max/MSP that was geared towards artistic development, and became a programmer after feeling that development was fun because it was a lot like playing with blocks. He experienced development environments at several different companies, and joined SpeakBUDDY in 2014. He developed the English vocabulary app "Majitan", the TOEIC app "App Tore", and the English grammar app "Majigura"with the company before starting development on SpeakBuddy's iOS app.

Originally from Hawaii, she graduated from a university in the US. From 2015, she spent 3 years as an ALT with the JET Programme, teaching English, and running English classes and events for many students from elementary schoolers to adults in Nagano prefecture. She also experienced a short 4 month study abroad program at Tokyo International University, and after her JET Programme experience ended, she came across SpeakBUDDY while looking for a job that would allow her to be connected to people and to use her English and Japanese language skills. She deeply empathized with the company's mission, and wanted to help accomplish it, so she joined the company in August of 2018.

Originally from the Netherlands. He attended Utrecht University, one of the top 100 universities in the world, where he got his master's in mathematics. After working at companies in many fields from finance to IT, he came to Japan in 2017, and joined SpeakBUDDY in July of 2019. He has been doing development for SpeakBuddy using the latest AI technology, machine learning and deep learning, and voice recognition.

Working for 14 years at a large English school corporation, she was involved in school operation and many new projects like developing new services for corporate users. When she was working as an office assistant at an importing and exporting company, she realized that there were people who could not accomplish their dreams because their English skills were not good enough, and that memory stuck with her, so when she found out about SpeakBUDDY's personal coaching program, that uses the AIxEnglish conversation app SpeakBuddy to teach English, she still remembers being excited about it. She met our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi and felt that she wanted to deliver a service that is fitting for our current era and beyond, so she joined the company in October of 2019.

Originally from the UK, he studied computer science at the University of Nottingham. He worked for various companies as a software engineer for 3 years. Then he worked as an English teacher at an English conversation school for 3 and a half years. He joined SpeakBUDDY as a server engineer in November of 2019. He is in charge of solving server issues when a new feature is added to the SpeakBuddy app, as well as other server integration and consolidation work.

He graduated from Souka University. He entered a large credit card corporation as a system developer, then assisted a startup company as a backend developer and did frontend development for an educational data creation tool. Once he was able to do development on his own to a certain level, he decided to prioritize what he wanted to do, which was something related to "education, medicine, the environment, developing the product at a product company, working with international colleagues, and smartphone apps" and came across SpeakBUDDY. He really enjoyed meeting the executives and other team members in the interview process and decided to join the company.

He has built his career mainly in the backend development field through doing development for EC Websites. He experienced the difficulty of having to communicate in a foreign language with no support, when he was working abroad in Vietnam, and felt that it was a necessity to learn English Conversation. When he returned from working overseas, there was a period of time where his feeling about the necessity of learning English conversation decreased a bit, but then he met Yokokawa-san at an Engineer study group and learned about SpeakBUDDY. He joined the company in January of 2021 because he was interested in our product and he felt that he wanted to contribute as an IC. He is in charge of the backend development and cloud infrastructure development for our SpeakBuddy app.

While he was still a student at Meiji University, he wanted to get a job related to English somehow, and was taking classes and seminars that were taught solely in English, and came across SpeakBUDDY. He thought that our services were innovative and started working at the company as an intern in the summer of his Sophomore year of college. He was a debugger for the SpeakBUDDY app for a year and a half, just after it released, then moved on to operating our digital advertisements. He felt the passion and speed of improvement that were built into the app and wanted as many people as possible to know about SpeakBUDDY, so he joined the company as a full time member in April of 2021.

Originally from Norway, he graduated from the University of Oslo. He did a 1 year study abroad program at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. In Norway, he worked as a backend engineer in the finance industry. In Japan, he worked as a full stack engineer, before joining SpeakBUDDY in April of 2021, as a web engineer. He is currently working on our landing pages, the Q&A Web Platform service, and adding new contents and features to our web projects.

From Guangzhou, China. She studied graphic design and contemporary art, and got her master's degree from Tokyo University of the Arts. She also had experience doing a short term study abroad program at the famous art university Central St. Martin's in the UK and has a deep understanding and knowledge about art and design. She worked for Alibaba China as a new graduate and experienced the company getting two hundred million dollars of funding for an education app that she was doing the UI/UX design for. In June of 2021, she joined SpeakBUDDY and has been doing a lot of work on the app's UI design as well as branding design for the company.

After graduating from the Sociology department of Doshisha University, she built DMP/CDP systems and using location data to support marketing activities at 2 startup companies. After that, she wanted to work at a product company, and came across SpeakBUDDY, and since she wasn't confident in her English abilities at the time, she felt that she could relate to the issues the company was trying to tackle. She also felt that she wanted to contribute to the growth of a product that she truly believed was good from the bottom of her heart, and joined the company in September of 2021. She is in charge of analyzing the data from each product and service (from gathering and linking data, to creating visuals for the data, and analyzing the data, as well as suggesting plans of actions based on the data).

He graduated from the department of computer science at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He was then in charge of development and direction for a service that dealt with athlete's voices at a sports media company. He wanted to do development that was related to English and had experienced his own perspective change after going overseas, so he empathized with SpeakBUDDY's goal and joined the company in September of 2021. Right now, he is working on the development of new features and bug fixes for SpeakBuddy's iOS app.

After working in the accounting and finance fields in both publicly listed and foreign owned businesses for over 10 years, she experienced setting up the back office division at a startup company. She had actually been studying English Conversation since she was in her late 20's, and had used the SpeakBuddy app on her own, so she empathized strongly with the company's mission and joined the company in November of 2021. She is in charge of accounting work.

She graduated from the Ochanomizu Women's University Graduate school with a master's degree in life sciences. As a new graduate, she joined Net Protections and was in charge of hiring, sales, and planning. After that, she joined a design planning company as a PR planner. Since she's the type of person that tends to get attached to the people, things, and places she is involved with deeply, when she came across SpeakBUDDY, she felt that the she wanted to do everything she could to help build an organization that could make the company's mission come true and its services succeed, and joined the company in August of 2022. Now, she is in charge of hiring and hiring PR.

She had been working at an English conversation school for 9 years since she graduated from university. She worked her way up from the staff level to deputy manager starting in sales and then moving to student management and counseling. She started learning English in junior high school and developed an interest in other languages and cultural differences, so she put a lot of effort into studying English. When she was in university, she got her English teaching license. She had a strong desire to help people achieve their goals and dreams through English, regardless of their age, so she empathized with SpeakBUDDY's mission. She was able to experience the atmosphere of the company, as well as our CEO Tsuyoshi Tateishi's character in interviews, and she joined SpeakBUDDY in August of 2022.

Originally from China, he graduated from Keio University's Graduate School with a major in design. He co-founded the game company Kinix, and served as its game director. He joined SpeakBUDDY in February of 2023 because he wanted to use the power of games to create a product for the language acquisition market that would deliver a truly one of a kind experience to users. He is now working mainly on UI/UX design, as well as product design and growth projects.

She graduated from the Foreign Languages Department of Sophia University. Since she was young, she naturally felt a familiarity with English as a result of visiting her grandparents' house in America, and listening to her mother teaching in an English classroom. She developed teaching materials for a large English Language School Corporation, and also has experience developing English Language content in a variety of mediums, including podcasts and other media. While doing that, she saw the issues that were present in the current English Language School Industry firsthand, and came across SpeakBUDDY. She felt the company's growth potential, as well as empathizing with the potential for our Personal Coaching business, that makes use of the app to deliver high quality coaching, and joined the company in February of 2023.

He graduated from the law department of Keio University. He has been fully committed to SpeakBUDDY since he was a freshman at university in 2019, doing a summer internship. As the company continued to grow quickly, he experienced helping out with acquiring investments and setting up new businesses, as well as winning a business contest prize and starting up his own student business. In April of 2023, he joined the product marketing group at the company, where he mainly worked on projects throughout the company related to growth.

He's originally from the US, but lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand now. He got a joint degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and the University of Washington, and then joined Monsanto after graduating. After that, he went to East Africa as a software engineer with the One Acre Fund, and designed, developed, and supported their Mobile Apps. After staying for 6 years in 7 countries in East Africa, he developed services that were used by over 1,000,000 users. He's been working with us as a Server Engineer from December of 2021.

Originally from Brazil, he was a software engineer at Dava Tech, where he led the team that was developing and manufacturing two factor authentification products in the SaaS industry. After that, he was a senior iOS engineer on the iOS team at Rakuten, where he helped improve the performance and UX of their product. He felt confident that he could use his expertise to contribute to the revolutionary product at a futuristic company like SpeakBUDDY, so he joined us in April of 2024.

After graduating from Tokyo Denki University, he joined Hitachi High-Tech Corporation as a new graduate in corporate sales and was in charge of promoting the usage of robotic surgical assistance and medical training devices to foreign owned corporations. After that, a certain life event inspired him to join a startup in field sales, where he was in charge of test sales for a new business. He empathized with SpeakBUDDY's mission and wanted to help our corporate sales grow even more, so he joined SpeakBUDDY in April of 2024 as a customer success manager.

After graduating from university, she worked at a bookstore, and also managing locations of a major drug store chain for around 10 years. After that, she changed jobs and entered the IT Sales industry. She felt that Web marketing and sales using technology was really interesting. She received a message from the head of the Corporate Business Division Ito, right around the time that she was thinking that she would "like to be able to deliver a product directly to consumers someday". She joined us as our first Inside Sales member, and is currently devoted to acquiring new corporate clients. She is also making use of social media as another method to approach new potential clients as well.

He went to America alone as a high schooler. After that, he did business planning, sales, and SE in many fields such as for trading companies, energy, IT, and fashion. Since 2014, he decided to give his undivided attention to English Language Learning, which he had been interested in for a long time, and began a path of children's English language education. He started with us as a contractor for the Personal Coaching service in 2021. He was drawn to the potential of combining AI with language learning and was sure that our organization's work environment would allow him to use his own previous experiences the best of his abilities, so he joined us as a full time member in May of 2024.

After graduating from university, she handled job listing advertisements and media representation and also experienced a wide variety of work in advertisement for a foreign-operated platform, as well as doing ad sales, ad operation, and starting up new businesses. When she was working at this business, she experienced difficulties due to her level of English ability and learned about SpeakBUDDY when she developed an interest in learning languages. She was able to experience the company's attractiveness as a user and wanted to use the knowledge and experiences she has acquired in marketing, and joined the company in May of 2024.