Tokyo-based Genesis Healthcare, the Japanese startup that develops and provides genetic testing kits, announced today that it has fundraised 620 million yen ($5.1 million) from US-based Founders Fund and Japanese trading giant Mitsui & Co. (TSE:8031) With the investment, the two investing companies took a 6% stake in the healthcare startup.
Since its launch in 2004 under the previous name of Weight Management, Genesis Healthcare has been developing and offering a variety of genetic testing and analysis services including DNA Banking as well as genetic testing kits for giving users advices for ancestry, lifestyle habits, alcohol metabolism promotion, cancer risk, dietary fat intake, or skin aging. The company has acquired genetic data from about 400,000 people in Japan.
In partnership with Mitsui upon the latest investment, Genesis Healthcare wants to expand their applications beyond to food or restaurant businesses and deliver optimized healthcare services to consumers. With the support of Paypal founder Peter Thiel who leads Founders Fund, the startup wants to better reach the global market while developing innovative technologies.
See the original story in Japanese. The Microsoft Innovation Award 2015 (MIA2015) is an annual opportunity to showcase how startups have developed innovative software and services that bring progressive ideas to life. The presenting ceremony for the award was held at Microsoft Japan headquarters in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago where the MIA Award and Audience Choice’s Award winners were announced following the finalist pitches. In the event, The Bridge coordinated two panel discussions focused on data-driven startups. Panel 1: How will a data-driven approach factor into healthcare apps and platforms? The event’s second session kicked off with a panel about how healthcare startups are leveraging big data to improve their platforms and businesses. Moderated by The Bridge co-founder Masaru Ikeda, this session included: Francois Cadiou (CEO, Healint) – on screen via Skype Yoko Gibo (Managing Director, Noom Japan) Yuji Mizoguchi (CEO, FiNC) Shinichiro Isago (Technical Evangelist Manager, Emerging Technology Evangelism, Microsoft Japan) Healint has developed an app called Migraine Buddy which collects data recorded from sufferers of migraine headaches. By recording the symptoms of migraines from patients, doctors can more accurately report on those symptoms. Healint performs big data analysis based on accumulated user data and, by sharing…
Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image by A Health Blog.
The Microsoft Innovation Award 2015 (MIA2015) is an annual opportunity to showcase how startups have developed innovative software and services that bring progressive ideas to life. The presenting ceremony for the award was held at Microsoft Japan headquarters in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago where the MIA Award and Audience Choice’s Award winners were announced following the finalist pitches.
In the event, The Bridge coordinated two panel discussions focused on data-driven startups.
Panel 1: How will a data-driven approach factor into healthcare apps and platforms?
From the right: Shinichiro Isago (Microsoft Japan), Francois Cadiou (Healint) on screen, Yoko Gibo (Noom Japan), and Yuji Mizoguchi (FiNC)
The event’s second session kicked off with a panel about how healthcare startups are leveraging big data to improve their platforms and businesses. Moderated by The Bridge co-founder Masaru Ikeda, this session included:
Francois Cadiou (CEO, Healint) – on screen via Skype
Shinichiro Isago (Technical Evangelist Manager, Emerging Technology Evangelism, Microsoft Japan)
Healint has developed an app called Migraine Buddy which collects data recorded from sufferers of migraine headaches. By recording the symptoms of migraines from patients, doctors can more accurately report on those symptoms. Healint performs big data analysis based on accumulated user data and, by sharing and marketing that information to pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, new medicines are developed and healthcare quality is improved.
CEO Cadiou argued that the app attracts many Japanese people:
Things like one’s own nervous system can be quite difficult to grasp, so patients should record and manage their condition daily, gather the appropriate data, and then see a doctor in order to recieve the optimal method of treatment.
FiNC, a mobile health technology startup in Japan, employs full time personnel, physicians, pharmacists, and instructors in the preventive medicine field. Most recently, with the release of their healthcare news app Wellness Post, FiNC has been making the push to proliferate medical information relevant to their users. Additionally they are working on a new preventative medicine crowdsourcing platform for nutritionists, trainers, and other health specialists.
NYC-headquartered Noom has been offering preventative medicine solutions for consumer and commercial use since 2008. More recently they have been developing a smart AI (artificial intelligence)-based personal coach app called Noom Coach, as well as Noom Health, an app that family physicians and trainers can use to get an accurate picture of their patient’s health based on each patient’s recorded diet and exercise, making it possible to offer counseling to many patients remotely at low cost, and with a high degree of accuracy.
Now is the time to make healthcare data a real focus
To start the discussion, the speakers were asked to share what led them to start their businesses. Speaking from his own clinical development experience, Cadiou found himself focused on the various ways progress can be made in transitioning from paper to web apps and sensors, and so on. To approach these hurdles, Cadiou started working with data scientists and programmers, considerably progressing his research and development practices in Singapore.
In view of many healthcare startups born out in the world, FiNC CEO Mizoguchi shared his point of view on the state of the healthcare market. He said,
Healthcare is a concern everyone shares, which is why we are in such a good market to expand globally.
Noom, on the other hand, broke into the market through a NYC-based startup accelerator specializing in healthcare. Gibo expressed,
The healthcare business world as a whole has a high barrier of entry and is a difficult place to grow as a business. That’s why the existence of an accelerator that combines big business with healthcare technology is so crucial, and also why Noom has also been able to work together with a variety of medical institutions.
Adding that through beginning to offer enterprise targeted services they have seen considerable growth. The healthcare field itself appears to be experiencing a movement of innovation right now that is justifiably garnering global attention.
The three companies are each engaged in analyzing data connected to their users’ healthcare and putting that into use in developing services, so the question of how is this kind of big data to be effectively used is becoming of interest. Gibo pointed out that as far as health care data goes, the data that has been collected so far is small, and supplying data to insurance companies and patients has only recently started. However, it can be said that a data-based business model incorporating feedback regarding insurance companies is on the verge.
Mizoguchi shared,
There have been a lot of offers for the trial deployment of our services, and we’ve begun dealing with the local government. […]
This has all just recently started in Japan so data and evidence are still scarce. With consent from users, we’d like to make that data open to use and build a structure for use and application. By recording physical, location, and movement behavior data, the time when we can provide individualized health care services based on users’ individual data may be soon. Our aim is to continue searching for the best ways to utilize data to make as many people happy as we can.
In response to this, Microsoft’s Isago said,
Up until now Microsoft has largely been involved in the game and entertainment industries, but the requests from people in other industries such as healthcare increased when the Kinect was introduced. […]
Basically I think you could say that more and more people are realizing the possibilities technology holds. Currently we’re focusing our efforts on the medical and security fields. We’re always on the look out for startups that are interested in working together with Microsoft to develop new services that utilize various different kinds of cloud data.
Gibo also expressed that the healthcare market itself is still in an early stage, and that through collaboration with businesses such as Microsoft to open up commercial channels, new paths are created.
Commenting on the future of healthcare Gibo had this to say,
In regard to health, we’re aiming for a worry-free society. Progressing to a society where people can understand their own bodies and have the appropriate control is the objective of healthcare.
Panel 2: How will data-driven startups change how to find the right job opportunities?
From the right: Shinichiro Isago (Microsoft Japan), Yukihiro Ikemi (Grooves), and Toshiyuki Oka (Atrae)
The second panel, regarding data-driven hiring platforms that turn skills and careers into data to meet with the needs of employers and suggest potential employers to users, featured the following people:
Shinichiro Isago (Technical Evangelist Manager, Emerging Technology Evangelism, Microsoft Japan)
Up until now Atrae has been running Green and other recruitment sites, but recently, in cooperation with big data analysis company Brain Pad (TSE:3655), they have launched a personnel mining service called TalentBase, which utilizes big data analysis AI. Unlike the typical resume based on your previous business experience, this new service creates reference data based on human relations using data analysis. The aim is to create better person to company matches based on connections and shared evaluations.
Grooves is currently running Forkwell, a portfolio site for engineers, as well as CrowdAgent, which generates recruitment matches from its 3,500 registered companies. It aims to be a national recruitment information portal with a network of more than 16,000 business people. Additionally, Grooves recenty established a HR tech R&D unit, aiming to conduct research on applications of artificial intelligence and big data analysis within the personnel recruitment field. Kenji Hirata, the first person to become engaged in international standardization of personnel training and competency was appointed as head on the research institute.
The HR market itself is calling for a major change
It could be said that one of the essential dilemmas among companies is how to effectively match potential employees with open positions. As the field of matching through the use of data and AI experiences a swell of interest, these problems are addressed. The discussion participants were asked what reasons led to the development of their services.
Ikemi explained that despite the fact that the recruitment business in Japan alone is a 7 trillion yen ($57.2 billion) market, 44 billion yen ($360 million) globally, these business practice haven’t changed since pre-war times. He said that as a tech enterprise, they started with the idea of wanting to create a service that will shake up the HR field in Japan. Even at that, he clarified by saying that the large amount of matching of people and businesses was “unexpected”. He supposed that similarly to dating and marriage matching sites randomness is a considerable aspect.
Ikemi explained,
Optimizing matching using big data is good, but we want to suggest matches that feel like stories.
Additionally, Ikemi explained that Japan not adopting HR-XML (Human Resources – eXtended Markup Language) had a major influence on the job hunting market. In the US, more so that recruitment platforms, crawler-type recruitment services are widely recognized, for the reason that HR-XML, which aims for the collaboration of recruit information, is continuing to become more familiarized. Through HR-XML, unification of topics like “Job Description” found on recruitment media and corporate sites has made possible automation and data-based matching, as well as personalized recruitment recommendations. However, Japan took a different path while not adopting such collaboration, which is why we have seen the spread of recruitment matching that utilizes individuals’ resources. From this, an opportunity is being missed to gather superior foreign personnel in Japan and inversely to send Japan’s superior personnel out into the world.
He continued,
We want to realize a new ‘Job Description’ in Japan.
When asked if things that were before done by humans be replaced by machines, Oka said he doesn’t think career consultation can be done with AI. He also said that more so than matching a person with a company through TalentBase, the aim is to create a place where a person can connect to another person within that company, and by focusing on building human relationships, new methods for choosing a place of work can be found that don’t necessarily rely on factors like one’s previous income and company position. Because we have to consider not just data but also human relationships, which can be seen as a sort of irrationality in society, said Oka.
Isago also commented that while working at Microsoft,
When doing recruiting through the same vendor, we can only gather one type of people. If the business itself wants to experience growth, how to create a place where recruitment matching for other types of people than those that have brought the company this far, this is the time to for businesses to meet this challenge.
Similar to healthcare, this is a task carried by the world’s businesses, which is why the successes of international enterprises set a global precedents, and why the potential for services themselves to expand globally is yet to be realized.
See the original story in Japanese. Touchten Games is a Jakarta-based game studio which has developed mobile games like Ramen Chain and Sushi Chain, a gamified O2O (offline-to-online) platform called Touchten Platform, and it also conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign for Target Acquired, a side-scrolling run and gun mobile game. The company announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese mobile game giant Gree and Silicon Valley-based startup investment fund 500 Startups in a series C round. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but we were told that it is worth around 7-figures in US dollars according to unnamed sources. This is followed by their series B round back from November of 2013 to March of 2014, funding from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures, Japanese anime studio TMS Entertainment, Singapore’s UOB Venture Management, and Indonesia’s Ideosource. The Bridge spoke with Touchten Games Co-founder and CEO Anton Soeharyo: We’ve been developing game titles to date, but we want to be a game publisher with a platform as well as keeping developing gaming titles. With the platform, we can invite many game developers in Indonesia and create business opportunities for them. To make this possible, we are adding several social features to…
CEO Anton Soeharyo (third from left), COO Rokimas Soeharyo (third from right), and CTO Dede Indrapurna (second from left)
Touchten Games is a Jakarta-based game studio which has developed mobile games like Ramen Chain and Sushi Chain, a gamified O2O (offline-to-online) platform called Touchten Platform, and it also conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign for Target Acquired, a side-scrolling run and gun mobile game.
The company announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese mobile game giant Gree and Silicon Valley-based startup investment fund 500 Startups in a series C round. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but we were told that it is worth around 7-figures in US dollars according to unnamed sources. This is followed by their series B round back from November of 2013 to March of 2014, funding from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures, Japanese anime studio TMS Entertainment, Singapore’s UOB Venture Management, and Indonesia’s Ideosource.
The Bridge spoke with Touchten Games Co-founder and CEO Anton Soeharyo:
We’ve been developing game titles to date, but we want to be a game publisher with a platform as well as keeping developing gaming titles. With the platform, we can invite many game developers in Indonesia and create business opportunities for them.
To make this possible, we are adding several social features to the Touchten Platform, such as a gifting feature, a battling feature (gamification), and an analytics system which typically depends on third-party platforms.
But developing this analytics system costs so much. Unlike analytics for websites, measurements using sessions or links which typical third-party analytics platforms are offering will make no sense for mobile game apps. We need to add an analytic system to our gaming publishing platform.
When we can create the one useful for gaming developers, we would like them not only in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries but also in the rest of the world to use it for distributing their titles.
In Southeast Asia, there are many game developers but few publishers distributing the former’s titles, which is a recurring problem. So Touchten Games found a business potential here in the gap. With the partnership with Gree, Touchten will be able to leverage experiences for game publishing that Gree has acquired for many years in Japan. This will also give the Indonesian startup conveniences to develop and market localized versions of game titles from Gree. Furthermore, we were told that a reason behind the investment at this time includes Gree’s intention that they want to launch O2O businesses in the Southeast Asian region.
Touchten Games was founded in 2009. We are not yet familiar with their exit plan. However, seeing how Soeharyo have been recently speaking or behaving, I think he is getting more interest in nourishing a startup ecosystem in Indonesia and the one connecting Indonesia and Japan, rather than running a startup. It will be interesting to see how the success of Touchten Platform will help many game developers in the region better reach the global market.
See the original story in Japanese. Joei Dai, the former General Manager of CyberAgent Ventures China (Beijing), has gone independent from the company and founded a new fund called Gravity Venture Capital (GVC). The new fund, focused on Chinese startups in the fields of O2O (offline to online) and IoT (Internet of Things), will work intimately with the Japanese market. Dai and his team is still under raising funds but aims to close by the end of July, expecting to be valued around $30 million. Having no portfolio company yet because it is a very new fund, they are looking to invest in startups involved in online sports communities and overseas travel services, as well as follow-up investments in companies invested by CyberAgent Ventures (CAV) from its Renminbi fund. GVC will be focused on investing in early-stage startups dealing with tool apps, sharing economy, cross-border e-commerce and supply-chain finance. So it is understood that the fund will follow the investment scope of CAV’s Renminbi fund. GVC told The Bridge that they are raising funds from top-tier funds of funds in China, A-share listed companies and CEOs of other listed companies in China, despite the fact that they cannot disclose specific names of their investors. A 2006 Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo) graduate, Dai…
Joei Dai, the former General Manager of CyberAgent Ventures China (Beijing), has gone independent from the company and founded a new fund called Gravity Venture Capital (GVC). The new fund, focused on Chinese startups in the fields of O2O (offline to online) and IoT (Internet of Things), will work intimately with the Japanese market.
Dai and his team is still under raising funds but aims to close by the end of July, expecting to be valued around $30 million. Having no portfolio company yet because it is a very new fund, they are looking to invest in startups involved in online sports communities and overseas travel services, as well as follow-up investments in companies invested by CyberAgent Ventures (CAV) from its Renminbi fund.
GVC will be focused on investing in early-stage startups dealing with tool apps, sharing economy, cross-border e-commerce and supply-chain finance. So it is understood that the fund will follow the investment scope of CAV’s Renminbi fund.
GVC told The Bridge that they are raising funds from top-tier funds of funds in China, A-share listed companies and CEOs of other listed companies in China, despite the fact that they cannot disclose specific names of their investors.
Joey Dai, Gravity Venture Capital
A 2006 Aoyama Gakuin University (Tokyo) graduate, Dai joined CAV after working at Japanese social media company Gaiax. He was appointed an investment manager at age 26, then General Manager of CAV Beijing office at 29. This was followed by management of the Renminbi fund he fundraised from investors when he was 31 years old.
According to PEDaily, an investment-focused news media in China, he was involved in investments in more than 50 projects during his seven years at CAV. 80% of them could find the next round and 10 startups made an exit, while 3 companies successfully IPO-ed.
His successfully-exited portfolio companies from CAV Renminbi fund include Fantongwang (restaurant booking service in China) and Koudai.com (mobile commerce in China). Noteworthy among others is Gfan.com (Android app market in China), which was successfully acquired in 2013 by Shenzhen-based cellphone retailing company Aisidi for $55 million, which gave his fund a 20fold return on investment.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Emotion Intelligence (previously known as DoBoken), the company behind a conversion improvement platform for e-commerce sites called ZenClerk, announced today that it has secured an undisclosed sum in a seed round from New York City-based startup investment fund SocialStarts. For Emotion Intelligence, this funding is followed by their angel round funding at the launch of the service last year. SocialStarts is a “venture fund family” founded by William Lohse, who previously served American IT news publisher Ziff-Davis Publishing as president, having invested in more than 130 startups including Tokyo Otaku Mode and FlyData from Japan. Born out of the sixth incubation batch of Japanese incubator Open Network Lab in spring of 2013, the team has been developing a solution to stimulate buying motivation of online shoppers. For e-commerce sites, one can analyze user behavior from smartphones and PCs by adding a one-line Java Script code into one’s website. Based on machine learning and data mining technologies, ZenClerk presents users with a discount coupon at the most appropriate timing and provides the potential customers with the extra encouragement to continue on to the purchase step. Emotion Intelligence Co-CEO Hajime Kuwayama spoke on the funding:…
Tokyo-based Emotion Intelligence (previously known as DoBoken), the company behind a conversion improvement platform for e-commerce sites called ZenClerk, announced today that it has secured an undisclosed sum in a seed round from New York City-based startup investment fund SocialStarts. For Emotion Intelligence, this funding is followed by their angel round funding at the launch of the service last year.
SocialStarts is a “venture fund family” founded by William Lohse, who previously served American IT news publisher Ziff-Davis Publishing as president, having invested in more than 130 startups including Tokyo Otaku Mode and FlyData from Japan.
Born out of the sixth incubation batch of Japanese incubator Open Network Lab in spring of 2013, the team has been developing a solution to stimulate buying motivation of online shoppers. For e-commerce sites, one can analyze user behavior from smartphones and PCs by adding a one-line Java Script code into one’s website. Based on machine learning and data mining technologies, ZenClerk presents users with a discount coupon at the most appropriate timing and provides the potential customers with the extra encouragement to continue on to the purchase step.
Emotion Intelligence Co-CEO Hajime Kuwayama spoke on the funding:
Consolidating with the stealth period, we’ve been developing and offering the solution for about two years. We’ve been dealing with purchase behavioral data of e-commerce users leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in obtaining a great volume of knowledge and data that is sufficient enough to help our clients in gaining their conversion rates.
Going forward, we’ll be more committed to gaining the accuracy of our AI-based Emotion I/O engine, aiming to contribute to the further development of the e-commerce industry.
We have seen many competitors in this sector, such as Exitmonitor, Granify, Upsellit, Optimonk, PicReel, Yieldify, CartStack, and OptiLead, mainly from the US and UK where e-commerce businesses are vibrant. We will report on how Emotion Intelligence will compete with these other platforms in the future.
Japanese startup Garapon is based out of Akihabara, a hardware startup hub for Japan as well as a “pilgrimage destination” for nerds. Since its launch back in 2010 by Ayumu Yasuda, former Yahoo Japan business developer, the company has been developing TV set-top boxes connecting to the internet, allowing users to play recorded videos on TV as well as to stream them to their tablets or smartphones over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connection. Unlike typical video recorders requiring timer-based recording reservations, the Garapon TV recorder simultaneously retains broadcast recordings from up to eight TV channels for the last 120 days (the maximum length depends on how high the resolution has been set on the user preference menu) so users will never miss recording TV shows and can keep watching a weekly drama series aired by a terrestrial local TV channel even when traveling or moving abroad. I thought that the company was focused solely on the Japanese market since TV broadcasting systems differ by country, such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM, which are non-interoperable with each others. However, he recently dropped me a line and told me that he has decided to go on a tour of the Philippines this week….
Garapon TV 4th Model
Japanese startup Garapon is based out of Akihabara, a hardware startup hub for Japan as well as a “pilgrimage destination” for nerds. Since its launch back in 2010 by Ayumu Yasuda, former Yahoo Japan business developer, the company has been developing TV set-top boxes connecting to the internet, allowing users to play recorded videos on TV as well as to stream them to their tablets or smartphones over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G connection.
Unlike typical video recorders requiring timer-based recording reservations, the Garapon TV recorder simultaneously retains broadcast recordings from up to eight TV channels for the last 120 days (the maximum length depends on how high the resolution has been set on the user preference menu) so users will never miss recording TV shows and can keep watching a weekly drama series aired by a terrestrial local TV channel even when traveling or moving abroad.
Garapon TV can simultaneously record and display eight terrestrial TV channels live over the internet. (This image is intentionally modified to protect the rights of content owners.)
I thought that the company was focused solely on the Japanese market since TV broadcasting systems differ by country, such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM, which are non-interoperable with each others. However, he recently dropped me a line and told me that he has decided to go on a tour of the Philippines this week. He explained that how many markets there are in Southeast Asia:
Unlike the days when TV programs were being broadcast in analog, many countries have adopted a common standard for digital TV broadcasting, which is ISDB-T, or the The Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting – Terrestrial. The Philippines also uses ISDB-T so our solution is available even there upon adjusting the software.
In order to adjust the software and develop an optimized edition for the Philippines, I will place our device in Manila to receive TV signals from local broadcasters so we can further develop it from Tokyo over the internet.
In addition to allowing users to play recorded TV programs on mobiles regardless of no matter where they are, the Garapon TV recorder keeps recording subtitles (for hearing impaired) and electronic program guide data in synchronization with videos; with this users can play and jump to a specific cue point within recorded programs by entering keywords.
Garapon CEO Ayumu Yasuda introduces the Garapon TV 4th model at the press briefing (August, 2014).
In Japan, they have sold over 13,000 Garapon TV recorders to consumers to date, recently gaining a high reputation for their online community site for TV afficianados.
Yasuda continued:
Now is the right time for us to expand into the Philippines since we understand that terrestrial digital TV broadcasting started there as late as last February.
According to my research, we can target over 10 million Overseas Filipino workers as potential users. They are working away from home and remit their wages to their family back home, earning as many as 13% of GDP for the country. They must miss local TV programs from their hometowns. […] We are finding local partners in the Philippines, aiming to offer the service for a monthly subscription fee ranging from 300 to 500 pesos (about US$7 to $11).
Yasuda and his team will stay in Manila from July 9th to 17th, discussing with potential local business partners or supporters. If you are interested in working with the company, feel free to contact him at ayumu [at] garapon.tv.
Garapon TV has fundraised from Japanese companies like Broadmedia and Mitsui Global Investment as well as Kronos Fund [1], and has also turned profitable.
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Kronos Fund is an investment fund by Japanese investor Taiga Matsuyama. ↩
Masaru Ikeda
Shintaro Eguchi
