Nikkei’s Sept. 25 morning edition reported earlier today that Tokyo-based Fablic, the startup behind Japanese flea market app Fril, has fundraised about 1 billion yen (or $9.2 million) from Japanese online recipe site Cookpad, gaming company Colopl, and VC firm Jafco. Fablic is earmarking the funds to enhance promotional activities with TV commercials as well as to hire in new employees.
Fablic, established in 2012, is a fourth batch graduate of Tokyo-based seed accelerator Open Network Lab. The company introduced a C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplace app in September 2012, an early entrant in the Japanese market which started its business about an year before Japan’s Mercari.
In July of 2014, Fablic CEO Shota Horii unveiled that the company has acquired over 1.5 million downloads, handling deals worth over $5 million via the platform every month. But today’s Nikkei report says that the downloads have already exceeded 1.9 million.
Fablic has not fundraised except for a small portion of seed funding from Open Network Lab. It is also understood that they have grown to date without much promotional efforts.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based 3d printing startup iJet Corporation recently introduced a new service called 3D Pipo, which allows users to create 3D avatars from a snapshot or a smartphone photo. A user can change the avatar’s clothing or hairstyle and share the images or videos via Twitter, Facebook, and Line. The service is available only for iOS, but an Android version will be released in December. The app also offers users the option of ordering 3D prints of an avatar for 5,980 yen ($55, consumption tax included) each. The company showcased the product at the Tokyo International Gift Show early this month to demonstrate that the app is not only for a personal hobby collection but can also serve as a gift or a souvenir for family or friends. See also: Meet the Japanese company that wants to be the Intel of 3D printing Prior to the launch of 3D Pipo, iJet Corporation fundraised about 200 million yen ($1.8 million) in May but details have not been disclosed. Coinciding with this, the company relocated its main office and printing facility from Yokohama to Tokyo.
Tokyo-based 3d printing startup iJet Corporation recently introduced a new service called 3D Pipo, which allows users to create 3D avatars from a snapshot or a smartphone photo. A user can change the avatar’s clothing or hairstyle and share the images or videos via Twitter, Facebook, and Line. The service is available only for iOS, but an Android version will be released in December.
The app also offers users the option of ordering 3D prints of an avatar for 5,980 yen ($55, consumption tax included) each. The company showcased the product at the Tokyo International Gift Show early this month to demonstrate that the app is not only for a personal hobby collection but can also serve as a gift or a souvenir for family or friends.
Prior to the launch of 3D Pipo, iJet Corporation fundraised about 200 million yen ($1.8 million) in May but details have not been disclosed. Coinciding with this, the company relocated its main office and printing facility from Yokohama to Tokyo.
Yokohama-based Orkney, the company that provides fieldwork-focused customer relationship management tools called Orkney Upward, announced Tuesday that it has fundraised 90 million yen ($839,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and SMBC Venture Capital on August 29. Prior to this the company had obtained about $1 million in loans from Japan’s state-run loan company Japan Finance Corporation in June. They will use the funds and loans for sales force enhancement and for adding more features to the tools. Orkney Upward is a web-based platform that allows salespeople on the go to easily check the profiles of their customers via smart devices. The platform works with a mapping solution that the company has been developing since its launch, providing the best route for visiting clients in fragmented locations. Based on a partnership with Salesforce.com last year, Orkney Upward is now available on the Salesforce cloud environment as well (see video below). Orkney was founded in 2002, a bit old to be called a startup. They had been focused on entrusted systems development, serving the mapping industry, before they launched the Orkney Upward (previously known as Orkney Geograph) platform in 2011. Oakney CEO Toru Mori previously worked at Alps Mapping (acquired by Yahoo Japan in…
Yokohama-based Orkney, the company that provides fieldwork-focused customer relationship management tools called Orkney Upward, announced Tuesday that it has fundraised 90 million yen ($839,000) from CyberAgent Ventures and SMBC Venture Capital on August 29. Prior to this the company had obtained about $1 million in loans from Japan’s state-run loan company Japan Finance Corporation in June. They will use the funds and loans for sales force enhancement and for adding more features to the tools.
Orkney Upward is a web-based platform that allows salespeople on the go to easily check the profiles of their customers via smart devices. The platform works with a mapping solution that the company has been developing since its launch, providing the best route for visiting clients in fragmented locations. Based on a partnership with Salesforce.com last year, Orkney Upward is now available on the Salesforce cloud environment as well (see video below).
Orkney was founded in 2002, a bit old to be called a startup. They had been focused on entrusted systems development, serving the mapping industry, before they launched the Orkney Upward (previously known as Orkney Geograph) platform in 2011. Oakney CEO Toru Mori previously worked at Alps Mapping (acquired by Yahoo Japan in 2008). Looking back on his early days at the company, he said that he had wanted to start a business in the geographic information systems sector at a time when there was no service like Google Maps.
He explained:
Mapping costs a lot and is also technically difficult. I founded Orkney to remove such barriers in 2002. I initially thought we want to do business in the open source integration space.
But the debut of the iPhone in 2008 was a major turning point in their business. While receiving many orders from academic institutions at that time, they began to plan a new mapping service for business use. That was the predecessor of the present Orkney Upward platform.
Why are there no other services providing this feature in a space with so many competitors? Mori explained that his company has an advantage in providing a better user experience through a web browser and a mobile app thanks to their years of continuous R&D.
As they have acquired over 100 clients, they are in the early to middle stage in their business development. What is interesting about Orkney is that such a company with a long history in R&D stepped forward to start a new business and made it a success.
Because CyberAgent Ventures led this round, are they becoming more focused on investing in enterprise businesses? CyberAgent Ventures SVP Terry Hayashiguchi explained:
Because the smart device penetration is rapidly rising in the business scene, I think some of conventional products, which were originally designed for PC use, are not enough to serve users.
Therefore, we are assuming that people who experienced to manage a business in a big company are becoming more interested in launching their own startups. In addition, compared to the US, we think there’s a huge space to innovate in the enterprise and other B2B sectors in Japan. Based on these perspectives, we aim to invest in more B2B startups.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based online learning service startup Mana.bo has raised 330 million yen (approximately $3.4 million) from Japanese education business conglomerate Benesse, Nissay Capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. This follows their previous funding last year in a seed round from investors including CyberAgent Ventures. Coinciding with the funding, the company unveiled that it will start a new consumer-focused learning service this fall. The funds will be used to hire more staff and promote the new service. Several funding rounds have occurred in the online education service sector. In August, online cram school startup online cram school startup Aoi.Co. raised $1.2 million from Jafco, and computer programming camp operator Life is Tech raised $3 million from several investors. In contrast with the declining birth rate in Japan and the news that a major cram school chain will shut down the majority of their schools, emerging educational service companies are showing good growth. Since its launch in April 2012, Mana.bo has been managing business based on a B2B2C model, where they provide their online tutor service in partnership with client companies in the educational industry. Benesse, which led the funding at this time, and Mana.bo jointly launched in…
Tokyo-based online learning service startup Mana.bo has raised 330 million yen (approximately $3.4 million) from Japanese education business conglomerate Benesse, Nissay Capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. This follows their previous funding last year in a seed round from investors including CyberAgent Ventures.
Coinciding with the funding, the company unveiled that it will start a new consumer-focused learning service this fall. The funds will be used to hire more staff and promote the new service.
Since its launch in April 2012, Mana.bo has been managing business based on a B2B2C model, where they provide their online tutor service in partnership with client companies in the educational industry. Benesse, which led the funding at this time, and Mana.bo jointly launched in April a service called Real-time Katei Kyoshi (real-time online tutor service). (See their promotional video below)
Mana.bo initially aimed to provide their service under their own brand. However, educational services are typically paid for by parents, who take into consideration the brand name of a service operator. In this regard, Mana.bo made the right choice and has been showing great success by leveraging big brands.
While seeing good growth in the service, Mana.bo succeeded in attracting talented people from the startup community in Tokyo, such as Daisuke Yamashita (previously with Japan’s online recipe site Cookpad, joined Mana.bo as CTO in 2013) and Junji Kondo (previously with Japan’s augmented reality startup Tonchidot, joined the Mana.bo team in July this year).
Mana.bo’s business is stable thanks to partnerships with big companies, but they will become just one of many outsourced companies rather than a startup if remain dependent upon that business model. We can also assume that funding at this time suggests Mana.bo are looking to exit by an acquisition by big companies like Benesse. However, the more massively Mana.bo runs businesses on a partnership basis, the more complicated benefit sharing between Mana.bo and their partnering companies will be because Mana.bo depends on these companies in acquiring students and procuring online tutors.
The company aims to solve this key issue with the new service starting this fall. According to Mana.bo CEO Katsuhito Mitsuhashi, they have more than 500 online tutors registered, chiefly students attending top universities like the University of Tokyo or Keio University, and they can teach students without assistance from the company. In a booth at the Mana.bo office, several tutors are on standby to receive questions from students.
In addition to preparing for Q&As from teachers and students online, the company has been developing a new app for the new service. The new app in a paper prototype has a sophisticated interfacbeyond reduce confusion when they ask a question. It also incorporates social media components. Further details when the app goes live.
The company needs to acquire students for the new service without partnering companies, so they have to gain brand awareness among parents. CEO Katsuhito Mitsuhashi will proceed on this issue while exploring new marketing channels, but he did not divulge much information on this point.
From the left: Mana.bo CEO Katsuhito Mitsuhashi and engineer Junji Kondo
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Crowd Cast, a startup developing cloud services and apps for expense management, launched a new iOS app called Staple today. Coinciding with this, the company also announced today that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from IMJ Investment Partners to strengthen service expansions in Japan and Asia. Crowd Cast released late last year an expense processing app called BizNote Expense. This app allows users to input company expense records via smartphone, which then transmits the data to a company’s accounting system. But Crowd Cast learned from experience that users only need an expense record input app since most companies have legacy workflow systems for expense reimbursements. That is why they split the workflow feature off from BizNote Expense and developed Staple, which is specifically focused on inputting expense records. Input records can be downloaded in CSV format on the web, enabling user records arrangement to conform with existing expense reimbursement systems. The company’s CEO Takashi Hoshikawa explained: We provide the personal edition of the Staple app for free, and its team edition, which we’re still working on, will be a paying app. By Launching the personal edition first, it helps users learn how…
Tokyo-based Crowd Cast, a startup developing cloud services and apps for expense management, launched a new iOS app called Staple today. Coinciding with this, the company also announced today that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from IMJ Investment Partners to strengthen service expansions in Japan and Asia.
Crowd Cast released late last year an expense processing app called BizNote Expense. This app allows users to input company expense records via smartphone, which then transmits the data to a company’s accounting system. But Crowd Cast learned from experience that users only need an expense record input app since most companies have legacy workflow systems for expense reimbursements.
That is why they split the workflow feature off from BizNote Expense and developed Staple, which is specifically focused on inputting expense records. Input records can be downloaded in CSV format on the web, enabling user records arrangement to conform with existing expense reimbursement systems.
The company’s CEO Takashi Hoshikawa explained:
We provide the personal edition of the Staple app for free, and its team edition, which we’re still working on, will be a paying app. By Launching the personal edition first, it helps users learn how to use the app and will lower the barriers for them to start using the Staple team edition when it’s live.
The Crowd Cast team developed the Staple app from scratch to prepare for the chance when possible heavy traffic is put on their cloud platform while more people start using the app on an individual basis rather than for their company. Moreover, the architecture restructuring may also help Crowd Cast add more functions to the app in the future.
Crowd Cast aims to launch the app’s desktop version for personal use, an Android version for personal use, and the team edition for all different platforms.
Worth mentioning is that the Android version will allow the import of transit riding records from contactless smart cards such as Suica or Pasmo, just by placing the smart card behind a handset of an NFC (near field communication)-enabled Android phone. For the Mobile Suica app, riding records will be automatically transferred to the Staple app, so that a user will not have to manually import records. The Suica and Pasmo platform’s smart-card system has a maximum capacity of 20 riding records, so a notification function will be added to the Android version so that users will not forget to import records from their smart cards.
Meanwhile, they have no plan to support the riding data importing function for the iOS version because iPhones do not have NFC chips. The new iPhone 6 has an NFC chip but is limited to Apple Pay.
US-based expense solution vendor Concur recently integrated with Uber and AirBnB, and allows users to import expense records from these “sharing economy” services, which will be followed by other companies like Expensify. In contrast with these trends, Crowd Cast is targeting Japanese/Asian city-dwellers with their solution, in particular with a public transit focus, to discourage standards-based formation of barriers against new market entries.
In this space, Japan and Singapore-based Klavis launched an app called Streamed, which also aims to support importing data from public transit smart cards.
Capy is a Delaware-registered and Tokyo-based startup that is developing an alternative security technology to replace CAPTCHA. The company announced on Friday that it has been selected by Microsoft Ventures as one of 11 startups that will join its fifth batch of incubation program in Tel Aviv, Israel. According to Microsoft Ventures, of the nearly 300 applications from 32 countries only 11 finalists were selected, including Capy, after several preliminary selection processes. See also: Capy offers text-free, mobile-friendly captchas Capy CTO Koki Shimada and other team members will spend several months at the Microsoft R&D center in Tel Aviv to further develop the security level of their recently announced risk-based authentication technology, while receiving support from several dozen mentors from companies like Akamai and Jerusalem Venture Partners. Capy raised a seed round funding from angel investors in 2012, and subsequently secured a series A funding worth about 100 million yen ($1 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco in 2013. The company won the IVS launchpad award at Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto last year. On a related note on Japanese startups selected by Microsoft Ventures, head-mounted display developer Fove was recently accepted to join the latest batch of Microsoft Ventures’ accelerator…
Selected startups into the fifth batch of incubation program, Microsoft Ventures accelerator Tel Aviv. (Capy CTO Koki Shimada is the forth from the right in the top row.)
Capy is a Delaware-registered and Tokyo-based startup that is developing an alternative security technology to replace CAPTCHA. The company announced on Friday that it has been selected by Microsoft Ventures as one of 11 startups that will join its fifth batch of incubation program in Tel Aviv, Israel. According to Microsoft Ventures, of the nearly 300 applications from 32 countries only 11 finalists were selected, including Capy, after several preliminary selection processes.
Capy raised a seed round funding from angel investors in 2012, and subsequently secured a series A funding worth about 100 million yen ($1 million) from Japanese investment firm Jafco in 2013. The company won the IVS launchpad award at Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto last year.
On a related note on Japanese startups selected by Microsoft Ventures, head-mounted display developer Fove was recently accepted to join the latest batch of Microsoft Ventures’ accelerator program in London. The team appeared on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco earlier this week.
Capy’s pitch at Startup Asia Tokyo, September 4th, 2014.
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
