What Tech Stacks Are Software Engineers Using in Tokyo Startups?

Hello! It’s Thursday — let’s talk about the tech stack I use at work 👨‍💻

As a startup, we use a mix of tools to stay fast and flexible. We do use Slack for communication, but we don’t have advanced integrations like webhooks for deployment notifications (yet 😅).

🧾 Docs & Coordination

• Confluence: For everything from API specs to research summaries and design docs
• Jira: Occasionally linked to Confluence for task tracking
• Figma: To view and comment on UI/UX designs
• tl;dv: For automatic meeting notes
• Mermaid: To create diagrams and workflows

💻 Application Stack

Frontend:

• Vite + React + TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
• Sometimes we use Next.js for larger frontend apps

Backend:

• FastAPI (Yes, partly because someone said it’s “AI-friendly” 🤔)
• MySQL with SQLAlchemy
• Depending on project scale: Supabase or TiDB as DB

🚀 Deployment & Infra

• GitHub: For version control
• Vercel: For quick frontend deployment (especially mockups or low-scale apps)
• AWS: Main backend hosting using Docker images
• Terraform: Starting to use it for infra provisioning in newer projects

Note: We don’t yet have well-defined CI/CD pipelines or full DevOps practices.

🤖 AI Tools

• We have a team instance of ChatGPT
• I’m not sure about Gemini, but we do have a paid Cursor IDE license for the team

There’s definitely room to grow (especially in automation), but that’s the beauty of startups — lots of room to experiment and shape the stack together.

I’d guess 50% of this is similar to other Tokyo startups. BTW, what does your company use? I’m curious 👀