ELYZA
Japanese-first LLMs and a no-code AI app builder, from a KDDI subsidiary
Overview
ELYZA is a Tokyo AI company from the University of Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, a consolidated KDDI subsidiary since 2024. It publishes Japanese open-weight LLMs under Llama and Apache 2.0 licences, builds LLM systems for large companies, and sells ELYZA Works, a no-code tool for building and sharing work AI apps, priced per account.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Llama-3-ELYZA-JP-8B (Llama 3 licence)
- ELYZA-Thinking-1.0-llm-jp-4 33B and 32B-A3B (Apache 2.0)
- ELYZA-Diffusion 7B base and instruct (Apache 2.0)
- Create and use AI apps
- Two-factor authentication
- Group publishing and API calls
- Light ¥980: use AI apps
- Basic ¥2,980: create and use AI apps
- Premium ¥4,980: AI agent features
- Two-factor authentication, group publishing and API calls
- SSO and customer-managed keys as paid options
- Terms on enquiry
Use cases
What you can produce with ELYZA
- Japanese open-weight LLMs to self-host, including Apache 2.0 reasoning and diffusion models
- Work AI apps built from a one-line description in ELYZA Works and shared with a team as forms
- Multi-step processes from AI-agent sessions saved as reusable apps (Premium accounts)
- ELYZA Works apps called from in-house systems through an API
- Custom LLM systems for large companies, such as drafting customer-response text and summarising calls
- Automated decisions on part of a card-application screening workload (Sumitomo Mitsui Card)
ASEAN Perspective
ELYZA in Southeast Asia
ELYZA is architecturally APAC-relevant but operationally Japan-centric. Japanese enterprises with ASEAN subsidiaries — particularly in finance, telco, and retail — can benefit from ELYZA's integration with KDDI's Japan-hosted GPU infrastructure, which addresses data-sovereignty requirements under Japan's APPI and can underpin intra-group ASEAN workflows routed through a Japanese data centre. ASEAN organisations looking to self-host can download open-weight models (Llama-3-ELYZA-JP-8B, ELYZA-Thinking-1.0-Qwen-32B) directly from Hugging Face for private-cloud deployment, eliminating cross-border data transfer concerns. However, ELYZA has no confirmed ASEAN office, no Bahasa/Thai/Vietnamese fine-tuning, and no regional reseller channel as of mid-2026, so direct procurement from Southeast Asia remains procedurally challenging.
ELYZA is one of Japan's more credible domestic LLM developers: open-weight Japanese models, including Apache 2.0 reasoning models released in October 2026, a 70B model selected for the Digital Agency's government AI trial, and KDDI's ownership and sales channel behind it. ELYZA Works is a sensible product, with published per-account prices, API access and enterprise security controls.
Everything is Japanese-first, from interface to support, and ELYZA Works needs at least 20 accounts on a three-month term. Teams outside Japan will get most value from the open weights.
What we found
ELYZA is a Tokyo company building large language models for Japanese. Started by members of Professor Yutaka Matsuo's laboratory at the University of Tokyo and incorporated in September 2018, it says it first developed its own LLM in 2020. Since April 2024 it has been a consolidated subsidiary of KDDI, which agreed to hold 43.4% directly and 10.0% through KDDI Digital Divergence Holdings; at the time ELYZA said it was aiming for an eventual "swing-by IPO" with KDDI's support.
Its open-weight models are the easiest way in. Llama-3-ELYZA-JP-8B, from 2024, carries Meta's Llama 3 licence, and the older ELYZA-japanese-Llama-2 family carries Llama 2's. Newer releases are Apache 2.0: Japanese diffusion language models published in January 2026 and, on 2 October 2026, two reasoning models post-trained on the National Institute of Informatics' llm-jp-4 base. The larger Llama-3.1-ELYZA-JP-70B, entered jointly with KDDI, was one of seven domestic models the Digital Agency selected in March 2026 for trial in government.
Commercially, ELYZA runs LLM projects for large companies and sells ELYZA Works, a no-code tool in which staff describe an app in a sentence and share the resulting form with their team, also callable by API. Earlier versions of this page said ELYZA published no prices; ELYZA Works now lists them, from ¥980 per account a month before tax for app users, with a 20-account minimum, and KDDI resells it as ELYZA Works with KDDI. In 2026 it added chaining of apps with human checks, apps saved from AI-agent sessions and a Japanese patent. ELYZA says its AI now automates 20% of staff-reviewed card screening at Sumitomo Mitsui Card.
The newest bets are ELYZA Voice Agent, a voice agent still in field validation, and ELYZA RSI Research, a unit studying AI that improves AI. Everything is built for Japanese organisations; buyers elsewhere will mostly use the open weights.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- ELYZA Pencil, the company's first public product, attracted 110,000 users in just 11 days after launch in 2022 — before generative AI became a global phenomenon.
- ELYZA's founding team comes from the Matsuo Lab at the University of Tokyo, one of Japan's most prolific AI spinout factories — the same lab that helped shape Japan's national AI strategy.
- KDDI paid for a 53.4% stake in ELYZA in April 2024, making a Japanese telco the controlling shareholder of the country's most prominent domestic LLM lab.
- The free public demo of ELYZA LLM for JP — built on Llama 2 and then Llama 3 — ran for over two years before being quietly closed in May 2026 as the company pivoted fully to enterprise contracts.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including ELYZA's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with ELYZA unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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