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Sony’s PlayStation visionary launches a new company

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

kutaragiKen Kutaragi, father of Sony’s PlayStation business, has launched a new Japanese startup called Cyber Ai Entertainment.

The name “ai” is a combination of the Japanese word for “love” and a pun on the English word “eye.” Former Sony executive Takashi Usuki is one of the board members. The venture is vaguely aimed at developing next-generation Internet services.

Kutaragi owns about 90 percent of the company, while Usuki has 10 percent. The startup has $223,000 in capital. That’s all the details out so far.

Kutaragi retired in 2007 after more than 30 years at Sony. He started an earlier startup, Cellius, in January 2007 with $821,000 in funding. The venture was 51-percent owned by Namco Bandai and 49-percent owned by Sony’s game division. That startup was aimed at making apps for Sony’s Cell microprocessor, which is used in the PlayStation 3 and other computing platforms.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.