After announcing new CEO last week, Japan’s Mixi invests in two startups

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In the wake of announcing a new CEO last week, Japanese social network company Mixi (TYO:2121) continued a busy month by announced investments in two startups today. At its financial results briefing, incoming CEO Yusuke Asakura talked about future changes planned for Mixi, including aggressive investments in promising companies.

The two investment disclosed today are CloudStudy and Reventive. CloudStudy will receive 72 million yen (over $700,000), which will account for 20% of its total funding to date. The figure for Reventive was not disclosed but it is somewhere in the tens of millions. The startup has other investors including Sunbridge Global Ventures and some angel investors, adding up to 70 million yen in total.

StudyPlus is a social learning management platform that was released back in March of 2012. It hit the 100,000 user milestone after almost a year later in April of 2013 . Users can study languages or prepare for university entrance exams by recording their study hours and content, sharing progress with friends if they choose. The platform can be used anonymously, making it easy to connect with other users.

The startup’s CEO Takashi Hirose shared some interesting figures about their growth to date. So far they have 23 million monthly page views, with about 9,500 of their 12,000 active users recording learning activities every day with the app. That means 80% of all the users who log into the service enter a record, typically 3.5 times a day on average. StudyPlus is available both on the web, as well as via iOS and Android apps.

As for Reventive, its main offering is an app called Close, which is available on both iOS and Android. Close is sort of a Path equivalent, limiting the number of friends you can have to nine people. The app aspires to be the most secure place to connect and communicate with the most important people in your lives. There is a big update planned for June, so stay tuned to see what they have in store. Close is a graduate of KDDI Mugen Labo.

Written with contributions from Masaru Ikeda