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 👀