Valt Japan Routes Company Work to Excluded Workers

Valt Japan routes company assignments to workers who face barriers to employment, matching tasks to their capabilities as businesses contend with labor shortages and operational bottlenecks. The platform offers a path into paid work, but it also places company and labor-market needs at the center of the arrangement.

Who Gets Through the Gate

At a patient advocacy group meeting, about 30 people with mental health and developmental conditions told Takanari Ono that medication helped manage their symptoms but hadn't solved their difficulty finding stable employment. “That was a shock to me,” Ono said. “I had thought that if symptoms improved and health became stable, quality of life would naturally improve. But it was not that simple.”

Ono founded Valt Japan in 2014, after working in the pharmaceutical industry. He said he wanted to create “an age of outstanding success for people who face barriers to employment.” The company includes disabilities, illnesses, health conditions and other circumstances that make work harder to access in its broad definition of those barriers.

Valt Japan runs Next Hero, a business process outsourcing platform, and Next Hero DIC, a network of directly operated digital work support centers. The company takes assignments from businesses and distributes them based on data about partner offices’ and workers’ capabilities and characteristics. Its premise isn’t to reserve “easy” tasks for people excluded from employment; it assigns real business work.

Ono cited a Recruit Works Institute estimate that Japan may face a labor shortage of about 11 million workers by 2040. He also estimated that 15 million people in Japan face barriers to employment. Together, the figures frame the company’s project as a response to both workers shut out of jobs and businesses seeking labor.

Real Assignments, Corporate Terms

Next Hero DIC Marunouchi, created with Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd., brings the model into a digital work support center. People with disabilities, chronic illnesses and other employment barriers handle actual company assignments in a setting designed to resemble a mainstream workplace.

Valt Japan first assesses people’s abilities and characteristics through work samples and other data. It then uses real assignments to identify tasks and environments where each person can do well. Companies can watch candidates perform actual work before employment, rather than relying only on documents, interviews and short internships. Workers build skills through practice, while both sides assess whether a match has potential.

“DIC does not exist to achieve a statutory employment rate,” Ono said. “It exists so that people with disabilities or chronic illnesses can become a force for companies.” The work is presented not as a charitable side project, but as a way for people previously excluded from the labor market to contribute to business operations.

Many assignments involve digital transformation, artificial intelligence and business process improvement. Workers may use AI to create and update sales lists, improve operations or streamline processes that previously required larger teams. They may also work with training data used to improve AI systems. “We contribute both by using AI and by helping create the data that allows AI to evolve,” Ono said.

Capital Finds a Social Problem

Valt Japan has announced plans to develop 20 DIC centers nationwide. The account describes a company-run platform and support centers, not a grassroots mutual-aid or self-organized worker network. Valt Japan routes work through its data and partner offices, while companies provide the assignments.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government established the Tokyo Financial Award, which Valt Japan received in the Sustainability Category in 2025. The award supports Tokyo’s goal of becoming an advanced, sustainable financial city and a place where globally active startups are created. Tokyo’s Bureau of General Affairs Statistics Division put the city’s gross metropolitan product at over 125 trillion yen in fiscal 2023.

Ono said employment support often draws goodwill but not enough resources to change structures. “Deep social issues are far from people, money, and work,” he said. “The power of capital is what brings them closer.” He described Marunouchi as one of the economy’s central arenas and said Tokyo’s concentration of companies, capital, workers and social challenges made it suitable for Valt Japan. “People are the most important investment,” Ono said. “And I believe the greatest market with untapped potential is the 15 million people who face barriers to employment.”