Japan’s Fringe81 secures $3.5M, strengthening ad server solutions for mobile media sites

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Fringe81 CEO Yuzuru Tanaka speaks at Movida School in 2013. Photo by Shintaro Eguchi

Tokyo-based ad tech startup Fringe81 announced on Friday that it has fundraised 420 million yen (about $3.53 million) from iStyle Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures, Gree, Dentsu Digital Holdings, and TBS Innovation Partners [1]. The company will use the funds to strengthen human resources for further  development of ad server solutions for mobile media sites.

Fringe81 was launched in 2005 under the former name of RSS Kokokusha (literally meaning RSS ad agency) where they had been focused on advertising in RSS feeds. Rebranded to Fringe81 in 2010, the company has added several new ad tech solutions including Digitalice, a cloud-based ad server platform that allows advertisers and media companies to analyze ad performance as well as user behavior and how these users crawl the websites after viewing ads.

Coinciding with the funding, Fringe81 announced that Kazuhiro Obara, former executive director at Rakuten and former senior manager at Google Japan, has joined the management board in order to accelerate business development.

Via TechCrunch Japan

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy


  1. iStyle Capital is the investment arm of iStyle, the company behind Japan’s leading cosmetics review portal @Cosme. TBS Innovation Partners is the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Tokyo Broadcasting System, or TBS for short.