Building Impossible Things

Press release March 19, 2018

Ascent Robotics, Inc.

Ascent Robotics: is developing autonomous vehicels for Japanese OEMs,

has raised over 1.1 billion yen in a Series A investment.

―Accelerating public road experiments and AI R&D―

Deep Reinforcement Learning company, Ascent Robotics (headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo; CEO: Masayuki Ishizaki), is developing software to bring autonomous driving to Japan, raised over 1.1 billion yen in its Series A. This is the company's first funding round since its founding in late 2016.. SBI Investment lead the investment, while several additional investors are expected to complete the round.

Ascent will use the funds raised to accelerate development of our on road experiements with a new fleet of 4 Lexus Hybrid and further develop our neural science and AI research in order to build the first AI car that can reason. Over the next months we will develop Atlas (our unique simulation learning system) to build an understanding of Japanese streets by merging the maps we capture with our simulation build a better ground truth for learning. We are looking at both model free and model based approaches.

In addition to building a cutting-edge lab in Tokyo, Ascent will also develop research and testing offices overseas. Ascent is planning on opening an office in Montreal, Canada and Singapore within the next 12 months. Ascent will continue to hire leading researchers and engineers from around the world with a goal to becoming the leading robotics learning company in Japan.

Ascent believes that we should be able to develop a fully fuctional AI Car by late 2020 and be ready for testing and validation with OEM partners. Ascent believes its approach allows a single system to learn the complex roads of Japan to the large complex roads of the US or even China. By adapting to legal regulations and the market situation, the company will work with OEM’s to provide the right level of technical level for the specific vehicle or robotic systems.

* ATLAS facilitates efficient AI development and training environment for cars and industrial robots based on 3D environments that mix real world, simulated and generated data to provide the perfect environment to train 1000s of agents at a time. See the next page for more details.

Investors (parentheses indicate general partners）

Ø SBI AI&Blockchain Fund (SBI Investment Co., Ltd.)

Ø Bart J. Broadman and others

Building Impossible Things

n Comment by Takeshi Goto (Executive Vice President and Director, SBI Investment) "We value Ascent's excellent AI technical expertise and decided to select them for the first investment of SBI AI&Blockchain Fund. They have a great team with excellent talent from around the world. We hope that they will become a globally active company, not just by achieving self-driving vehicles but by realizing AI that can be put to use in a wide range of businesses."

n Comment by Masayuki Ishizaki (CEO, Ascent Robotics)

"Procurement of 1.1 billion yen in Series A funds within 18 months of the company's establishment is a great motivator to accelerate our mission of 'Building Impossible Things.' It is also a great honor to have been selected as the first investment of the SBI AI&Blockchain Fund. We hope to focus our utmost efforts on research and development in order to achieve genuinely self-driving vehicles that can run under all circumstances at an early stage."

n Robot AI environment ATLAS achieves genuine self-driving adapted to all regions

Ascent is advancing the development of the robot AI training environment ATLAS, which integrates VR and AR human interfaces, a simulation environment with GAN technologies, and AI algorithms.

ATLAS, fully developed by Ascent, is a collection of frameworks to develop and educate AI agents to learn complex set of tasks. Because these agents learn in a simulator, they do not require large volumes of real world data, making them superior in terms of speed and cost. Ascent has achieved zero-shot transfer learning to robotic systems (Industrial robotics through to vehicles), in which the AI agent understands the intent of given tasks, and can apply effective reasoning in achieveing its objectives. The company is currently building a system to handle occuled objects and harsh road conditions.

Ascent's autonomous vehicels built with ATLAS will not require three-dimensional high-definition maps to be effective drivers. The system can remember (episodic memory) and reduce high dimensional data captured by the vehilces sensors into a stable navigational 2D map that will allow it to drive in new environments and road conditions with little calibration. A car trained in Japan can in theory learn to drive in China or the US with a small amount of calibration.

Lastly, ATLAS is not limited to self-driving vehicles; it accommodates diverse robotics systems. Ascent is currently experimenting with Industrial robotics, harvesting systems, and smaller mobility robotics.

Building Impossible Things

<Outline of ATLAS features>

ATLAS consists of human interfaces, machine learning algorithims and frameworks, generation and predictive models, and a number of simulators; allowing high speed and low cost development of complex robotic agents.

<Example of an ATLAS training environment>

The ATLAS simulator can replicate various sensor data, change in climate and roads (Japan, Sinagpore, Canada/US, etc), and can provide various views to the agent to learn in from semantic models to optical flows. The system can train the full visual system completely in system.

Building Impossible Things

n About Ascent Robotics https://www.ascent.ai/

Ascent is a leading AI technology company in Tokyo engaged in neural science inspired machine learning and AI development with a goal of developing the world’s first fully reasoning AI vehicle within the next few years.

Address: 11F, Giraffa, 1-6-10 Hiroo, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo Founder: Masayuki Ishizaki (CEO), Fred Almeida (chief architect) l Masayuki Ishizaki (CEO)

Ø Masayuki has held senior posts including executive officer, partner, and VP of top companies including IBM, Oracle, and Accenture. His last post was as country manager of Deloitte Digital Japan.

l Fred Almeida (Chief Architect) Ø With years of experience in the IT industry and enterprise-level AI, Fred has held senior

posts at Pasona Tquila and Salesforce, where he directed all system development. l Sakyasinga Dasgupta (CSO)

Ø Sakyasinga has a doctorate in physics from the Max Planck Research School of George August University. After working as a researcher at Microsoft, a senior researcher at IBM Research Tokyo, and head/chief researcher at LeapMind, he joined Ascent Robotics in February 2018 as chief scientific officer (CSO).

l Katsunori Mikami (CFO) Ø Katsunori is a certified public accountant (CPA) in the state of California. Having

operational know-how from both Japan and the United States, he served as CFO at Warner Brothers Japan.

l Ken Kutaragi (unaffiliated director) Ø Honorary Chairman, Sony Computer Entertainment

Senior Technology Advisor, Sony CEO, Cyber AI Entertainment

l Dan Cardell（unaffiliated director） Ø Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Wilkes University

Chairman, Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA)

Established: September 2016

Number of employees: 34 (as of the end of February 2018)

■Inquiries regarding this news release

Ascent Robotics, Inc.

Public relations: Matsunaga or Yu

TEL: 03-6721-9948 E-mail: pr@ascent.ai