Bit7 Labs is 128 people working four floors above a sake shop in Sakuragaoka, Shibuya. We share one espresso machine and one pact — nothing leaves the floor that we wouldn't put in our own homes.
On the morning of 14 February 2020, three of us signed a one-page document and stuck it to the inside of an empty studio door in Sakuragaoka. The first sentence read: we are starting something quiet.
The page laid out three things we wanted to be true about the company we were beginning. That we would treat adult intimacy as a serious subject — not a joke, not a transgression. That we would treat privacy as the product, not the disclaimer. And that we would build at the pace required by the materials, the model, and the people we hired, and not by capital.
Six years later, the page is still on the door. The studio is larger, the catalog is longer, and three waves have shipped — but the language has not moved.
— Mei, Toshi, and Aren · principals
The atelier is laid out around a single hallway with high windows. You can stand at the espresso machine and see all four wings if the doors are open.
Anechoic recording booths, listening rooms, and the dialogue annotation team. The most quiet wing — often the most opinionated.
Where embodied units are sculpted, cast, tinted, and finished. Smells faintly of pigment, daylight, and good silicone.
Capacitive arrays, thermal stacks, the firmware team. The wing where the lights stay on the latest.
Where the studio meets owners. Demos, fittings, custom commissions. Booked by appointment only.
Mei, Toshi and Aren sign a one-page document on a studio door in Sakuragaoka. Eight people on the floor.
Three sentences, six languages, late on a Friday. The studio plays them on repeat for a week.
The first silicone formulations are mixed in-house. The team grows from twelve to twenty-eight; the espresso machine is replaced.
The original ethics charter is locked; the three external reviewers are seated for the first time.
The first hand-poured silicone body comes out of the casting bay; the lead sculptor signs the underside.
Forty Series I units are built and shipped; thirty-eight are picked up by atelier technicians, in person, in twelve cities.
The dialogue model retires Aria-3 — and a year of pre-training data — for a smaller, licensed corpus.
Eight thermal zones; the first hand-tinted units leave the floor. The atelier passes 100 staff.
The model card and evaluation appear on arXiv; the studio quietly dedicates the paper to a former cellist on staff.
Reservations for spring 2026 delivery. We are here.
The flagship embodied series enters production. Lots of forty, made in Tokyo.
We hire slowly and we listen carefully. If you write us, we will read it. If you apply for a role we do not have, we will probably read that too.
Help calibrate the next two voices. Strong background in prosody, pause structure, and dialogue annotation.
Lead the tinting team. Five years of pigment chemistry or fine-art conservation experience.
Sub-millimetre capacitive sensing in soft-tissue forms. PhD or equivalent industrial work; embedded firmware comfort.
Maintain the on-device runtime, the deletion pipeline, and the audit interface. Reports to Aren.
Run fittings and demos. Native-level Japanese and English; warmth and discretion the actual job description.
We sponsor visas for Japan. We do not advertise on job boards — these are the only listings.
The atelier is in Tokyo. Service partners in Berlin, Paris and São Paulo handle yearly servicing for owners in those regions.
4F, 12-3 Sakuragaoka-chō
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0031
Japan
Atelier ZWEI · Mitte
Linienstraße 132
Germany
Atelier Saint-Honoré
21 Rue de Castiglione
France
What Bit7 actually sells, behind the velvet, is dignity around a subject that has not had much.
The Bit7 atelier reads more like a small Japanese studio for hi-fi audio than a tech company.
Aria-7 is the first conversational model I've used that knows when not to say anything.
The ethics charter is the most coherent document of its kind I have read out of any AI company this decade.
The listening room books two weeks ahead. Come for an hour. We'll make you a coffee.