I'm the CEO & Founder of DemandSphere, an enterprise AI search intelligence platform. I've spent most of my career working in search, data, and enterprise SaaS.
Before founding DemandSphere, I built the first enterprise SEO platform on the market at Covario, which was acquired by Dentsu Aegis in 2014.
DemandSphere was originally named GinzaMetrics and we rebranded in 2017.
In 2015, I also co-founded Functionize, an AI-powered testing automation platform.
You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, X, and SpeakerDeck.
DemandSphere
DemandSphere is an enterprise AI search intelligence platform, providing a unified view of brand visibility across SERPs, LLMs, and agentic search experiences. I founded the company in Tokyo in 2010 and continue to lead it. We have over 250 enterprise clients, across the United States, UK, Japan, and Europe.
FOUND Conference
I created FOUND Conference in 2013 as a place to bring together agency and in-house marketers, tool providers, and industry leaders to work together on the future of search and AI. We've held events in Tokyo, San Francisco, New York City, and Columbus. FOUND Conf Tokyo 2025 was our largest event to date, bringing together global search experts at Otemachi Mitsui Hall with simultaneous English-Japanese interpretation.
Speaking
I speak regularly at industry events including brightonSEO, SMX Advanced, Pubcon, ad:tech Tokyo, Slush, Tech SEO Connect, SEO Square, Search SEOul, ad:tech Shanghai, the Data Conference, and others. Recent talks have focused on building a unified view of AI search for growth and exploring the relationships between AI answer engines and organic SERPs.
Personal projects
Meridian is a daylight-first time zone board. Stack the cities you coordinate with and read the working-hour overlap as a band of daylight instead of computing it. It handles daylight saving transitions and per-country weekend conventions, exports to Google Calendar and .ics, and runs entirely in the browser with no account and no tracking.
D Fetcher is a vitamin D synthesis calculator. It works out how many minutes of sun exposure you need to reach a target dose from live UV index data, solar position, your location, Fitzpatrick skin type, exposed body area, and age, with hour-by-hour and year-at-this-location projections. There is a free JSON API and an MCP server as well.
Technical interests
I work across the stack and enjoy building scalable systems. I've been involved in building real-time, enterprise-scale AI & data systems for more than 20 years. In the early 2000s, I was involved with building early agent systems in instant messaging environments, enterprise web portals, microformats for data, and machine learning (we called it "data mining" at the time).
I was introduced to the world of search and SEO in 2006 and have been in the industry ever since. As the industry grows, I am enjoying the ability to expand many of the technologies and practices pioneered in our industry to new use cases, including those related to product management, corporate strategy, and strategic intelligence.
Outside of work
I've had a lifelong interest in Japan and Japanese culture, philosophy, history, theology, and wilderness survival.