Company
Who we are, and how we got here.
A small senior team in Tokyo, working with clients in Japan, North America and beyond.
Message
Good technology is quiet. It works, it lasts, and it stays out of the way.
Most of the software problems we are called in to fix are not really technical. They are the result of decisions made without the people who understood the consequences in the room — a system built to a specification nobody questioned, or a tool adopted before anyone asked who would maintain it.
We started this company to work the other way round. We sit inside our clients' context, share the reasoning behind every decision, and write things down so the thinking survives after we leave. That is slower at the start and considerably faster by the end.
The name we chose says the same thing. Collaboration is the method. And the second half is a reminder that what we build has to fit into real working life — for our clients' teams, and for ours.
Naoki Matsuda
Co-Founder & CEO
Our name
Three ideas the name carries.
Not a slogan — the three things we hold ourselves to when a project gets difficult.
Collaboration
We work beside your team, not at arm's length. Shared context, shared decisions, and access to the repository from day one. Nothing is built behind a curtain.
Ownership
Your goals become ours. We take responsibility for the outcome rather than the tickets we were handed, and we say so plainly when we think a plan is wrong.
Life
Software has to live in the real world, and so do the people who build it. We work at a pace that lasts and hand over systems a team can genuinely operate.
Profile
Company profile.
- Company name
- Collaboration and Our Life
- Established
- 2024
- Location
- Tokyo, Japan
- Representatives
- Naoki Matsuda (CEO), Shota Fujita (CTO)
- Business
- Full-stack software development · Applied AI and automation · CMS and CRM solutions · AI training for teams
- Working languages
- English / 日本語 / 中文
- Business hours
- Mon–Fri, 9:00–18:00 JST
- Areas served
- Japan, North America, and remote worldwide
History
How we got here.
2024
Founded in Tokyo
Started by two engineers who had spent a decade watching good projects fail at the handover, with a deliberate focus on partnership over billable delivery.
2024
First long-term engagements
Early work in e-commerce and manufacturing established the model we still use: understand, shape, build, hand over.
2025
Applied AI practice established
Formalised our approach to production AI — retrieval, evaluation and cost control as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts.
2026
Renamed Collaboration and Our Life
Adopted a name that describes how we already worked, and extended coverage to North American time zones.
Leadership
The people accountable for the work.
Both founders stay hands-on. The people you meet in the first conversation are the people on the project.
Co-Founder & CEO
Naoki Matsuda
Naoki leads the business side of every engagement: scoping, commercial terms, and making sure the work stays connected to the outcome the client is actually paying for. Most of that time goes into translating between business intent and engineering reality.
- Engagement scoping and commercial structure
- Client partnership and long-term account ownership
- Japanese and English business communication
Co-Founder & CTO
Shota Fujita
Shota leads engineering and applied AI, working at the intersection of solid software and practical AI — architecting systems, mentoring engineers, and keeping delivery honest. Good technology, on this view, is quiet: it works, it lasts, and it gets out of the way.
- System architecture and technical direction
- Applied AI: retrieval, evaluation, production guardrails
- Engineering mentorship and code review culture
Let's talk about what you're building.
Tell us where the project stands — an idea, a stalled build, or a system that has outgrown its foundations. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner, and what we'd do first.