SAMURAI ARCHITECTS, Inc.

• Incident Lake

• Professional Services

SAMURAI ARCHITECTS, Inc. is a startup striving to transform the architecture industry by integrating spatial design with AI technology.As the company expanded its business and gained more clients among major corporations, ensuring reliability became a major challenge for further growth. To address this, the company implemented SIGQ’s Incident Lake to strengthen its audit readiness and begin accumulating and visualizing incident data. Furthermore, with the support of SIGQ’s hands-on professional services, the company took the next step toward obtaining SOC 2 certification. Here, we introduce the company’s efforts to take on the enterprise market, using reliability as its key asset.

• Due to a rapid increase in the number of customers, we needed to strengthen our incident response capabilities and improve the accumulation and utilization of insights.

• Management using generic tools carried risks of data tampering and loss, and there were concerns regarding security and audit compliance.

• We were looking for an incident management tool that was affordable, easy for the business side to use, and suitable for startups.

• To expand our enterprise customer base, it was imperative to strengthen our security framework and obtain third-party certifications.
  

• Incident Lake enables the efficient storage of workflow data, leading to improved quality through response visualization and knowledge utilization

• Incident Lake ensures that all audit logs are retained and cannot be tampered with, helping to strengthen security and audit readiness.

• With its simple UI and reasonable pricing, business users can manage it directly. It also provides a framework for the items that need to be recorded, ensuring smooth operations right from the start of the Incident Lake implementation.

• Our Professional Services team provides comprehensive support for your efforts to obtain third-party certification (SOC 2). A key asset for your continued rapid growth.

Strengthening Incident Management and Reliability: The Key to Success in the Enterprise Market

SAMURAI ARCHITECTS, Inc. is a startup based in Minami-Aoyama with the vision of “Create a Better Place With Technology.” Now entering its fifth year, the company is working to drive digital transformation (DX) across three key areas—architecture, real estate, and regional revitalization—by combining spatial design with the power of AI and IT.

The company’s business consists of two main pillars: its proprietary solutions business and its custom solutions business. In the proprietary solutions business, the company offers a range of services centered on its flagship product, “Rendery”—an AI platform specialized in generating architectural renderings—as well as “knock knock AI,” which allows users to easily place furniture in empty room images, and “VISIOAL,” a spatial visualization service that combines the expertise of professional architects with AI. The company has a large customer base that includes major developers, homebuilders, and real estate firms.In the Custom Solutions business, the company provides commissioned solutions tailored to the core challenges of its clients in the architecture and real estate sectors.

Keitaro Takayama, the company’s Director and CSO, cites the company’s strengths as “actively promoting the development of architectural AI technology, as well as flexibly incorporating cutting-edge, cost-effective technologies, including those from overseas services.”

It has been about two and a half years since the launch of Rendery, our flagship service, and we have been steadily gaining customers. However, behind this rapid growth, various challenges were beginning to surface. Issei Senoo, the company’s Head of Sales and Business Development Strategy, reflects on the situation at the time as follows:

"The success of our service depends on whether our customers trust us. In particular, to attract major clients, we needed to strengthen our incident response processes and management systems more than ever before."

Specifically, when large corporations adopt a service, they must submit a security checklist and pass an audit by a certification body to verify that the service meets their security requirements. Mr. Senoo notes that to further increase adoption in the enterprise sector, it was essential to strengthen operational systems across a wide range of areas, including the preparation of audit data, the establishment of incident escalation procedures, and the implementation of internal training.

In addition, as the number of users increases, the number of incidents naturally rises as well. To ensure efficient operations, it is essential to build up a knowledge base detailing what kinds of incidents have occurred in the past and how they were resolved. Figuring out how to accumulate this information smoothly was also a key challenge for the company.

Mr. Takayama said, “I had come to understand intuitively just how important security is in enterprise sales,” and reportedly felt a strong need for fundamental measures.

The Pitfalls of Generic Tools: Audit Trail Management and Data Design—Why We Chose Incident Lake　

Consequently, the company adopted Incident Lake as a platform to strengthen its incident management framework. The first reason Mr. Senoo cited was its ease of use for startups. Many incident management tools are designed for use by dedicated IT teams; they tend to be complex and large-scale, requiring significant time to master. For a growing startup, where the business side also needs to be actively involved in incident response, these characteristics were not a good fit.Incident Lake, on the other hand, leverages AI to combine advanced features—such as the accumulation and analysis of operational knowledge—with a simple user interface. For this reason, Ms. Senoo highly values the platform for its ease of integration into operational workflows, including those involving the business side.

On the other hand, companies in their early stages often rely on spreadsheets or general-purpose task management tools for incident management. However, Mr. Takayama says that for the following two reasons, he could not consider anything other than implementing a specialized tool like Incident Lake.

First, there is a lack of adequate audit trails and audit logs. To meet the security requirements of enterprise organizations, it is essential to prevent data tampering and maintain change logs that can withstand audits; however, general-purpose tools lack these features and are therefore insufficient as audit trails.

The second reason is the availability of a practical data model based on insights from the operational field. Incident Lake comes pre-configured with the data fields essential for incident management, making it immediately ready for use.Furthermore, it supports automatic data entry powered by AI. In contrast, when using general-purpose tools, you must design the data fields in-house, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Additionally, if required fields are not set up from the outset, there is a risk that you will be unable to track necessary records later on. Moreover, repeated customization to fit actual operations can lead to data inconsistencies down the line, resulting in various issues from a knowledge management perspective.

Mr. Takayama summarizes the reasons for adopting Incident Lake as follows.

“We decided to implement Incident Lake because we were confident in the reliability of a solution developed using insights gained from the front lines of incident management. Furthermore, their deep understanding of the security requirements demanded by enterprises aligned perfectly with our company’s strategy of expanding our presence among large corporations,” said Mr. Takayama.

Incident Lake is already proving invaluable on the front lines of the company’s incident response efforts. When an incident occurs, the sales and customer success teams take the lead, contacting customers and requesting assistance from the engineering team. Throughout this process, they document everything in Incident Lake while working to resolve the incident and report back to the customer. Incident Lake has received positive feedback from the field for its ease of use.

“I really like the simple, user-friendly UI and the fact that they’re flexible in responding to our feature requests. For example, when we asked to be able to upload files within incident tickets, they responded quickly,” said Ms. Senoo.

Professional Services Provide Comprehensive Support for Third-Party Certification—The Key to Rapid Growth

Looking ahead, Mr. Takayama aims to further expand the company’s presence in the enterprise market, with its flagship service, Rendery, at the core of its strategy. Specifically, he is eager to establish a winning strategy for the AI era through the following two initiatives.

The first is the development of AI specifically tailored for the construction industry to meet enterprise requirements. While general-purpose AI is advancing rapidly, its adoption in the enterprise sector remains challenging due to issues such as the opacity of training data and the difficulty of meeting security requirements. Therefore, we are devising a strategy to establish a competitive advantage over general-purpose AI by providing AI services that the construction industry can use with confidence.

The second is to accumulate architectural designs and business processes as data and turn them into assets. Just as AI coding has evolved by feeding on data from GitHub, the idea is to provide AI that delivers greater value to customers by training it on the intermediate stages of architectural and design processes.

To bring this vision to fruition, it is essential to accumulate client data within Rendery, which makes further tightening of security requirements indispensable. To that end, the company is aiming to obtain SOC 2 certification, a third-party certification.

“As more large companies adopt these systems, and when considering factors such as fundraising, there is a growing need to demonstrate that a company is trustworthy from a third-party perspective. Obtaining third-party certification is essential for effectively communicating initiatives such as the strengthening of internal controls to the outside world,” said Mr. Takayama.

That said, obtaining SOC 2 certification is no easy feat. Compared to other third-party certifications, there is a lack of available information, so we had to proceed by trial and error—from conducting a current status analysis to selecting an audit firm to consult with. Mr. Takayama recalls that although the company had intended to pursue certification for about two years, it was difficult to allocate resources to the effort given the rapid growth of its core business.

To break this deadlock, SIGQ’s Professional Services team has been assisting with SOC 2 certification since August 2025. By engaging senior management and collaborating with on-site engineers, the team has been leading discussions and strategic planning for certification from the earliest stages. Furthermore, with SIGQ facilitating the process and establishing partnerships with appropriate specialized organizations, efforts toward SOC 2 certification have gained full momentum.

“What I appreciate most about SIGQ is their deep commitment to our internal team and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and work alongside us. I’m truly grateful that they support our transformation efforts with a sense of urgency, treating us as if they were part of our own team,” said Ms. Senoo.

For startups, establishing security frameworks and building incident management systems are areas that tend to be put on the back burner precisely because they don’t directly contribute to immediate growth. However, if a company aims for rapid growth in the enterprise market, these are indispensable strategic assets. SIGQ will continue to support SAMURAI ARCHITECTS as they take on the enterprise market through Incident Lake and our professional services.