A Division of Rakuten Marketing, LLC and Sentient Technologies Announce Exclusive Partnership to Bring Sentient Ascend, the World's First Website and Landing Page Optimization Solution Based on Evolutionary Artificial Intelligence, to the Japanese Market

TOKYO and SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 2, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- A division of Rakuten Marketing, LLC and Sentient Technologies, the world leader in distributed artificial intelligence, are pleased to announce that Rakuten Marketing Japanese subsidiary, Linkshare Japan K.K., and Sentient have entered into an exclusive business agreement to bring Sentient Ascend to the Japanese market.

Through this partnership, Rakuten Marketing, LLC group has the exclusive rights to sell and market Sentient Ascend in Japan, and will offer Ascend in combination with its other marketing services and technology offerings, creating a unique and powerful solution for advertisers in Japan.

Sentient Ascend uses online evolutionary algorithms, a form of artificial intelligence, to rapidly test and evolve massive numbers of website and landing page designs to find the one with the best performance. Unlike traditional A/B testing systems, which only test one new design at a time, Ascend gives advertisers the power to test dozens of ideas all at once. Ascend's AI determines the best combination of these changes - out of thousands or even millions of designs - to find the version of the site or landing page that achieves the best return on investment for the advertiser.

While results vary from campaign to campaign, the ability to test so many ideas for improvement all at once, have yielded conversion gains from 5 percent to as high as 40 percent in mere months for Ascend customers in the U.S., Australia and Europe. These include leading companies in e-commerce, telecommunications, travel and financial service sectors.

Sentient Technologies is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, creating breakthrough AI products and research thanks to its advanced AI platform. It has pioneered ways to combine deep learning, evolutionary computation, neuroevolution and other forms of AI, and distribute it across many data centers and on thousands of GPUs and CPUs, a scale unavailable to most companies. Sentient's scale and expertise has allowed it to create AI solutions for e-commerce, digital media and finance, as well as partner with renowned institutions, like MIT and Oxford, on projects tackling complex problems in healthcare and agriculture.

Babak Hodjat, Cofounder and CEO, Sentient Technologies said, "The reputation of Rakuten Marketing, LLC group, for delivering the highest quality marketing services, and for leading in marketing technology, along with their extensive relationships with Japanese leaders in e-commerce and lead generation, make them the ideal partner for Sentient. Our interests are wholly aligned in providing Japanese clients with the best possible performance for their marketing campaigns and websites."

Ryugen Shimizu, Managing Director, Rakuten Marketing Japanese subsidiary stated, "This partnership with Sentient Technologies will accelerate our business, help our advertisers significantly increase their conversion rates, and make it possible to implement Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle in marketing activities at speeds that are not humanly possible. We look forward to expanding this new marketing solution to the Japanese market."

For more information about Sentient Ascend visit sentient.ai/ascend

PR Contacts:
Paul Jarratt, +1 408-598-0775, paul.jarratt@sentient.ai
Lisa Tadje, +1 801-718-9980, lisa.tadje@rakuten.com

About Rakuten Marketing LLC
Rakuten Marketing is the global leader in integrated marketing solutions, spanning affiliate, display and search. Rakuten Marketing empowers marketers to achieve the full potential of digital marketing by delivering data-driven personalized ad experiences that engage consumers - across screens, platforms and traditional publishers - and influence them to purchase. Rakuten Marketing is committed to transparency, providing consumer journey insights that are used to continually optimize for performance.

Rakuten Marketing is one of the world's leading Internet service companies. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in Australia, Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. Follow us on Twitter or learn more at http://rakutenmarketing.com.

About Rakuten Marketing's Japanese subsidiary
We are providing high ROI (Return on investment) online marketing service as a B2B marketing company of Rakuten Group to empower clients such a major EC sites and Financial sites with solutions that go beyond the expected, from superior service and technology to consumer. http://jp.linkshare.com/

About Sentient Technologies
Sentient Technologies builds disruptive products differentiated by scaled AI. Sentient's powerful distributed artificial intelligence (AI) platform combines multiple AI disciplines (deep learning, evolutionary AI, neuroevolution) with unmatched scale. Sentient has used its platform to launch Sentient Investment Management and Sentient Aware, an AI-powered personalization and product recommendation engine used by some of the world's top retailers. Sentient Ascend, its artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversion rate optimization (CRO) solution, automates and accelerates website testing and optimization, allowing its customers to drive revenues and conversion improvements faster than ever before. In addition to its commercial endeavors, Sentient works with leading universities to apply AI to solve challenging problems in healthcare, food production and other areas.

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SOURCE Sentient Technologies