Japanese founder Miori Sagara was working with machine learning for language translations when it was just being integrated into most technologies. Collaborating with government offices and academics, she developed a corpus-based machine translation for the e-commerce industry. Although the project was cut short, the potential of combination of human skill and machine learning was still on her mind. So three years later Miori founded Baobab, a startup designed to provide annotation data for machine learning. The company's platform uses machine learning to create translation engines specialized for particular areas, focusing on providing improvements in efficiency and image annotation, tagging, and captioning of images and videos, and voice transcriptions. It then builds and provides data to meet the diverse and often highly specialized needs of corporations and research institutions in Japan and overseas.

Baobab uses human annotators, nicknamed “Baoparts,” to help with their machine learning data. Hailing from 22+ countries all over the world, Baoparts vary widely in their careers and experience; many live in rural areas or islands where employment is scarce, some are stay-at-home parents hoping to secure a secondary income, and many self-identify as living with developmental disabilities like autism. Miori takes pride in the diversity of her Baoparts, especially when it comes to hiring the people with disabilities, so she was keen on learning how to create an even more sustainable and welcoming workplace for all aspiring Baoparts. One Baopart from Cambodia left the feedback: “I appreciate how Baobab always treats us as a true partner, never as an item on a list.”

Since launching in 2010, the scale of Baobab’s clients has grown both in size and in geography, expanding to overseas markets. In parallel, their Baoparts were becoming even more multinational and diverse. As the company was entering this new stage of growth, Miori wanted to expand in a more sustainable way. While watching the news, Miori found out that Google for Startups was launching an accelerator program in Tokyo. “Google offers services to the entire world, and I wanted to learn how Baobab could expand our services on a global scale.” says Miori. So, she enrolled in Google for Startups Accelerator: Japan program, a three-month program that consisted of in-person training and mentoring sessions at the Google for Startups Campus Tokyo space.