Cinnamon AI
Cinnamon Inc. · Coding · Productivity
Cinnamon AI is a Japanese document AI vendor. Flax Scanner reads handwritten forms and complex tables without templates, and Super RAG turns those files into a private enterprise chatbot.

About Cinnamon AI
What Is Cinnamon AI
Cinnamon AI is the trading name of Cinnamon Inc., a Tokyo company founded in October 2016 and led by CEO Mirai Hirano. It sells two products that share one technical base: Flax Scanner for document data capture and Super RAG for question answering over internal files. Both build on IDP, short for intelligent document processing, which pulls structured data out of messy pages.
The pitch is aimed at back offices that still retype paper. Flax Scanner handles invoices, order sheets, contracts and survey forms, including pages a classic AI-OCR engine rejects because of handwriting, merged table cells or missing print lines. Super RAG then lets staff ask questions in plain language and get answers with the source page shown next to the reply.
The limits matter as much as the features. Both products are sold to businesses, mostly in Japan, through a sales conversation rather than a sign-up button. Super RAG runs on Microsoft Azure only, and the cheapest published plan is a shared cloud tier that the company still labels as provisional. Small teams and solo users have no self-serve option.
Getting Started
- Send a request through the Cinnamon AI contact form and describe the document types or the internal knowledge base you want to handle.
- Run a trial. Super RAG has a free trial with guidance from the vendor's generative AI specialists, and Flax Scanner demos are arranged through sales.
- Set up the workspace. For Super RAG, upload internal files, define user groups and decide which group sees which documents.
- Connect the output. Route extracted fields into your ERP or workflow tool, or embed the RAG chatbot where staff already work.
Product Information
A quick look at Cinnamon AI's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Finance and accounting teams
- HR and general affairs staff
- Systems integrators and IT teams at mid-size firms
Tasks
- Reading handwritten and non-standard forms
- Pulling line items from tables with merged cells and blank fields
- Answering policy and contract questions with citations
- Building a department-specific assistant
Scenarios
- Monthly accounts payable close
- Help desk volume spikes after a policy change
- Pre-project document review
Key features
Template-Free Document Capture
Flax Scanner reads a form without coordinate definitions, pre-training or a template build. That changes the economics of small document sets: a batch of 40 supplier invoices no longer needs a two-week setup before the first page is read. The same engine covers fixed layouts and irregular ones.
Handwriting and Complex Table Recognition
The scanner targets the pages that break older AI-OCR tools, including handwritten entries, merged cells, empty cells and star-mark grids. For finance teams, that's the difference between scanning half of a monthly batch and scanning all of it. Accuracy still varies by document quality, so plan a review step.
Generative AI Extraction Layer
Cinnamon AI pairs its own IDP engine with large language models, so extraction can follow an instruction rather than a rigid field map. Users describe what they need from a document and the system returns the values. The practical gain shows up on mixed packets, where an invoice, a delivery note and a purchase order arrive in one PDF.
Super RAG With Layout Awareness
Super RAG keeps the layout and structure of a document when it indexes it, which helps with charts, figures and tables that plain text chunking destroys. Answers draw on those structures instead of isolated sentences. The vendor's NAACL 2025 industry paper describes the layout-aware graph approach behind it.
Multi-Hop Question Answering
A single question often needs facts from several files. Super RAG runs multi-hop queries that search and reason across documents before answering. In a contracts team, that means one question can span the master agreement, an amendment and a price schedule without the user opening three folders.
Source Citations and Single-Tenant Security
Every answer can display the document and passage it came from, which makes verification fast. Deployments are single-tenant, either in Cinnamon AI's cloud or the customer's Azure environment, and admins can split user groups so each group only reaches its own files. The company holds Privacy Mark and ISMS certification.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Handles handwritten and irregular forms without template work, which is the main cost driver in classic AI-OCR projects.
- Super RAG shows source passages, so answers can be checked instead of taken on faith.
- Single-tenant deployment and group-level file permissions fit departments with confidential documents.
- Published Super RAG pricing gives a real starting number, roughly ¥150,000 per month plus a ¥700,000 setup fee on the entry plan.
- Research output is public, with accepted papers at NAACL 2025, PAKDD 2025 and ICDAR 2024.
Cons
- No self-serve signup and no public price list for Flax Scanner, so evaluation starts with a sales call.
- Super RAG runs on Microsoft Azure only, which rules out AWS-first or on-premise-only shops unless a custom deal is struck.
- The entry plan is marked as provisional, so budget figures can move before a contract is signed.
- Interface and documentation lean Japanese, and English-language support material is thin compared with US vendors.
Frequently asked questions
It sells document automation software. Flax Scanner converts scanned forms into structured data, and Super RAG answers questions using a company's own files. Both are business products sold through sales, not consumer apps.
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