This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Japanese startup Kaizen Platform, offering website user interface improvement solutions, announced today it has fundraised $8 million in a series B round. Participating investors are YJ Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures, Saison Ventures, Colpl, Eight Road Ventures Japan (previously known as Fidelity Growth Partners Japan), Gree Ventures, and GMO Venture Partners. Eight Road Ventures Japan, Gree Ventures, and GMO Venture Partners participated in the previous round.
With the latest funds, Kaizen Platform has fundraised a total of $17.8 million for three years since launch. The funds will be used to strengthen management foundation, product development and global expansion.
Upon announcement at this time, the company announced that their platform for enterprise users, launched back in August 2013, has been adopted by 170 companies and added $200 million in revenue through their websites by optimizing the online experience of website visitors. According to Kaizen Platform CEO Kenji Sudo, the company’s online experience improvement solutions are leveraging more than 2,900 crowdsourced growth hackers worldwide.
See the original story in Japanese. Gozal is a Japanese crowdsourcing site for back office operations like procedures upon establishing companies or social insurance scheme coverage for employees. BEC, which offers this Gozal platform, announced last week that they have raised about 100 million yen (about $830,000) from CyberAgent Ventures (hereinafter CAV), Venture United, Saison Ventures, and Japanese web marketing company Speee. It has been about a year since BEC raised 10 million yen (about $83,000) from CAV’s Seed Generator Fund at the end of 2014. Along with this fundraising, BEC substantially upgraded the functions for Gozal. Gozal was officially launched in March 2015 (launched as beta version in August 2014) to offer service as a crowdsourcing platform for consultations in these seven professions: lawyers (law offices), patent attorneys (patent offices), certified public accountants (accounting firms), certified tax accountants, judicial scriveners, administrative scriveners, and social insurance and labor consultants. With this upgrade, a new function was added in which procedures like establishing companies or enrollment of employees under the social insurance is templated. All the users have to do is to follow the instructions and fill in the column with the required information; the specialists in those seven fields can…
Gozal is a Japanese crowdsourcing site for back office operations like procedures upon establishing companies or social insurance scheme coverage for employees. BEC, which offers this Gozal platform, announced last week that they have raised about 100 million yen (about $830,000) from CyberAgent Ventures (hereinafter CAV), Venture United, Saison Ventures, and Japanese web marketing company Speee. It has been about a year since BEC raised 10 million yen (about $83,000) from CAV’s Seed Generator Fund at the end of 2014.
Along with this fundraising, BEC substantially upgraded the functions for Gozal. Gozal was officially launched in March 2015 (launched as beta version in August 2014) to offer service as a crowdsourcing platform for consultations in these seven professions: lawyers (law offices), patent attorneys (patent offices), certified public accountants (accounting firms), certified tax accountants, judicial scriveners, administrative scriveners, and social insurance and labor consultants. With this upgrade, a new function was added in which procedures like establishing companies or enrollment of employees under the social insurance is templated. All the users have to do is to follow the instructions and fill in the column with the required information; the specialists in those seven fields can handle these procedures.
Motohiro Takatani, founder and CEO of BEC, realized cost reductions by templating the standardizable workflow. He emphasizes that the quality of services is guaranteed due to consultations with specialists. The users can also entrust the entire procedure to these specialists upon request.
In this upgraded Gozal, one of the new functions is automatic notification of users as to changed trade name registration when they modify the name of their company in the profile. The users just need to fill in or change the information required on the platform, and Gozal informs automatically the users of the following procedures. With this function the users do not need to focus attention on all the procedures, and they can just rely on Gozal.
It is very interesting that this automatic notification system is not programmed in advance on Gozal but Gozal will be progressing with its machine learning system based on the advise from the specialists in the seven fields. Normally when this kind of function is released, the system is programmed and patternized based on all assumed scenarios. However, Gozal has been learning the patterns using this machine learning system, it makes possible the release of this function without completing all possible scenario patternization. It can deal with the frequent lack of extracting scenario, the more the users go on Gozal, the better Gozal reads users’ minds. BEC is applying for a patent of this function and implementation.
In this industry, there are some competing companies like Freee and Bizer. However, Takatani has confidence and says:
To choose the task itself is not very easy. Thanks to this automatic notification system, Gozal makes the labor procedures easier for users unfamiliar with those procedures.
Although the target users of Gozal are the managers of small and medium enterprises or startups, they plan to develop a function which makes the employees partially input the data by themselves in the future and which allows the managers to minimize time as well as labor. They also intend to cooperate with Credit Saison (TSE:8253), the parent company of Saison Ventures, to develop new services.
Gozal has about 1,000 companies using their services and the number of agencies charged with the procedures in the seven fields is about 200. The platform has matched more than 300 cases, and the total of the handling fee generated via Gozal exceeded 2 million yen (about $16,500) as of the end of October, 2015.
Translated by Minako Ambiru via Mother First Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy and Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Amazing Story, the Japanese startup consisting of multinational team members, launched an event planning and managing app called Everest App for iOS this month. The app allows one to organize personal events across multiple apps such as Google Calendar, Facebook and other social network services. Its basic functions include checking events on calendar, reviewing back past events with other attendees and planning new events. Amazing Story’s CEO Jeffrey Moon explained what motivated him to develop Everest App: When I was attending a business school while working as a strategy consultant, I had been struggling with the complication of managing my schedule using multiple apps. I came up with development of this app to eliminate the inconvenience in managing schedules. The app is aimed to help busy business professionals ease managing events from multiple apps. To add emotional elements in the app, users are allowed to share photos or comments with other users participating in the same event. In addition to Jeffrey Moon who originally came from South Korea, each member of his team has a multinational background so the app has been available both in English and Japanese since its initial launch. What…
Tokyo-based Amazing Story, the Japanese startup consisting of multinational team members, launched an event planning and managing app called Everest App for iOS this month.
The app allows one to organize personal events across multiple apps such as Google Calendar, Facebook and other social network services. Its basic functions include checking events on calendar, reviewing back past events with other attendees and planning new events.
Amazing Story’s CEO Jeffrey Moon explained what motivated him to develop Everest App:
When I was attending a business school while working as a strategy consultant, I had been struggling with the complication of managing my schedule using multiple apps. I came up with development of this app to eliminate the inconvenience in managing schedules.
The app is aimed to help busy business professionals ease managing events from multiple apps. To add emotional elements in the app, users are allowed to share photos or comments with other users participating in the same event.
Everest App
In addition to Jeffrey Moon who originally came from South Korea, each member of his team has a multinational background so the app has been available both in English and Japanese since its initial launch. What makes Everest App quite different from other event managing apps such as Peatix is focus on helping users manage their personal events and community because Everest App intends users to plan their events by leveraging their social graph and share experiences with attendees only.
The team says they plan to launch an Android version in February.
The Amazing Story team
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. The Consortium of Co-creation for Drone Society, based inside Keio University’s research institute at SFC, was established December 25th last year but on Thursday announced its plans for the future to the press. These include educating specialists and non-specialists alike as regards drones, to shore up the human resources situation, in particular for Japan. The Consortium was organized in the wake of legal restrictions being mulled by Japan in relation to drones. Its research team comprises Keio academics such as Internet/IoT guru Jun Murai and security issues analyst Ken Jimbo, as well as some leading-edge businesspeople, among two dozen other experts involved. Additionally, it will conduct research involving the use of drones in society while promoting drone business overall. Initially, the group aims to push drone racing activities specifically, at the press conference unveiling the holding of Aerial Grand Prix Japan. The February 14th event at Keio SFC is a “World Drone Prix in Dubai” qualifier. The drone business is seen expanding henceforth into fields like autonomous driving, 3D printing and logistics, arenas where startups can shine in. The new…
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
The Consortium of Co-creation for Drone Society, based inside Keio University’s research institute at SFC, was established December 25th last year but on Thursday announced its plans for the future to the press. These include educating specialists and non-specialists alike as regards drones, to shore up the human resources situation, in particular for Japan.
The Consortium was organized in the wake of legal restrictions being mulled by Japan in relation to drones. Its research team comprises Keio academics such as Internet/IoT guru Jun Murai and security issues analyst Ken Jimbo, as well as some leading-edge businesspeople, among two dozen other experts involved.
Additionally, it will conduct research involving the use of drones in society while promoting drone business overall. Initially, the group aims to push drone racing activities specifically, at the press conference unveiling the holding of Aerial Grand Prix Japan. The February 14th event at Keio SFC is a “World Drone Prix in Dubai” qualifier.
The drone business is seen expanding henceforth into fields like autonomous driving, 3D printing and logistics, arenas where startups can shine in. The new organization, which will hold a series of meetings in March, will be worthy of participation for those eyeing new opportunities even though the sky may not quite be the limit.
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. As IT industry workers normally work facing to desktops or laptops, more than a few of them are willing to use items like a standing desk to avoid sitting at work for all day. While there are many jobs that let people work while standing, one of the hardest is probably surgical operations which force surgeons to keep standing for long hours. A wearable chair called Archelis (meaning ‘walkable chair’ in Japanese) is designed for surgeons, allowing them to sit during surgery, thus reducing fatigue during long and physically demanding operations. It was developed for people in the medical field, but it can also help any worker in any industry who must stand for long periods. [1] Archelis was developed by Yokohama-based mold factory Nitto in collaboration with Chiba University’s Center for Frontier Medical Engineering, Hiroaki Nishimura Design, and Japan Polymer Technology. They aim to begin selling the product this summer. Translated by Minako Ambiru via Mother First Edited by Kurt Hanson and Masaru Ikeda Regarding wearable chairs, Swiss startup Noonee was in the news last year for developing a line for factory workers. A product similar to “Archelis”…
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
As IT industry workers normally work facing to desktops or laptops, more than a few of them are willing to use items like a standing desk to avoid sitting at work for all day. While there are many jobs that let people work while standing, one of the hardest is probably surgical operations which force surgeons to keep standing for long hours.
A wearable chair called Archelis (meaning ‘walkable chair’ in Japanese) is designed for surgeons, allowing them to sit during surgery, thus reducing fatigue during long and physically demanding operations. It was developed for people in the medical field, but it can also help any worker in any industry who must stand for long periods. [1]
Translated by Minako Ambiru via Mother First Edited by Kurt Hanson and Masaru Ikeda
Regarding wearable chairs, Swiss startup Noonee was in the news last year for developing a line for factory workers. A product similar to “Archelis” or “Noonee” can be found gaining patents － expired since － 37 years ago. The name for this product given by its inventor, one “Robert Bonner,” was in fact “wearable chair.” ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Usually, means of contacting apparel factories in Japan are limited to word-of-mouth or assistance by acquaintances. Since there are difficulties in finding appropriate factories, it is not easy to launch anew an apparel business or to manufacture products that are different from conventional ones, so that a new idea can barely be realized in this field. Japan’s SD Factory aims to solve such problems. SD Factory, launched last November by Osaka-based Raccoon (TSE:3031), is a matching platform for those wanting to order manufacturing of clothes and find domestic apparel infrastructure such as factories or patterners. Currently 22 factories are listed on the website with each detailed information including the number of lots, unit price, completion date, characteristics or pictures of the factory inside. Based on these information, one can search out factories and inquire or order from them. Although the service has just started up recently, some business negotiations for various matters have already been proceeding, based on requests of from sole proprietors to major trading companies. The average number of employees for listed factories is about 30. For factories which cannot afford information provision or sales promotion, SD Factory has turned into an…
Usually, means of contacting apparel factories in Japan are limited to word-of-mouth or assistance by acquaintances. Since there are difficulties in finding appropriate factories, it is not easy to launch anew an apparel business or to manufacture products that are different from conventional ones, so that a new idea can barely be realized in this field. Japan’s SD Factory aims to solve such problems.
SD Factory, launched last November by Osaka-based Raccoon (TSE:3031), is a matching platform for those wanting to order manufacturing of clothes and find domestic apparel infrastructure such as factories or patterners. Currently 22 factories are listed on the website with each detailed information including the number of lots, unit price, completion date, characteristics or pictures of the factory inside. Based on these information, one can search out factories and inquire or order from them.
Although the service has just started up recently, some business negotiations for various matters have already been proceeding, based on requests of from sole proprietors to major trading companies. The average number of employees for listed factories is about 30. For factories which cannot afford information provision or sales promotion, SD Factory has turned into an effective tool for customer acquisition.
Bringing diversity to the apparel productline
The operating company Raccoon had been originally running a wholesaling website focused on apparel and grocery products, especially for the retailer Super Delivery. More than 1,000 manufacturers and 40,000 retailers have been registered on it. Behind the development of SD Factory, this conventional service revealed a problem in the apparel field.
We received many requests from downstream manufacturers or retailers to introduce them domestic factories. They wanted to manufacture their own products but had no idea which factories to ask.
Moreover, a result of our own survey indicated current problems which domestic factories have in common, so we came to start development of a solution which connects manufacturers and factories.
A lack of means to connect creators and factories will impact the apparel industry and customers as a whole. If manufacturers pursue only their profitability, only similar products would be going on the market, and that can spoil the joy of shopping or ideals of consumers. However, since retailers or creators that have interesting ideas do not know how to turn them into concrete products, the variety of products on the market cannot be expanded.
By support of SD Factory for matching these creators with factories having capable of producing, appearance of unique products in terms of prices, shapes, or materials, can be expected and that will bring the activation of the apparel field.
The point which the team was most particular about upon the development of SD Factory was being a cool website especially for younger users. That was to eliminate the dull image of typical factories. All photos on the website are taken by Raccoon’s staff in order to secure a high quality of the website. In addition, detailed impressions of the factories are described on the website by sales staff who actually visited there, trying to convey the atmosphere or the passion of the factory workers.
The reason for sticking to being cool is also upon looking forward to Japanese factories’ future 10 or 20 years on. As the birthrate is falling and the society rapidly aging in Japan, the younger labor population has been gradually decreasing. Without young workers to keep alive the skills and the technologies, the very existence of Japanese factories may become threatened.
Nagamine pointed out:
In spite of the move to create brand new products, the factories’ future is under threat. I think that this is because young Japanese do not regard working at factories as an employment option.
A lack of young and superior human resources will result in the decline of the entire industry. I want them to feel first how fun manufacturing is or how cool the existence of a particular technology is.
Currently focusing on matching companies or sole proprietors with factories, they are also considering the business of securing and developing human resources in the apparel field henceforth. Although there are many graduates from technical colleges that relate to apparel, most of them get a job as apparel shop salespersons. Their future vision is to provide opportunities to launch business careers for students who are interested in manufacturing, and to provide for successors to factories.
Anyone can realize their own products
The ordering users being targeted by SD Factory include not only companies but also sole proprietors or individuals who want small-scale production. You may think typical factories tend to avoid small lot orders. It is the opposite however, according to Nagamine. While small lot production requires more labor than mass production, it ensures appropriate remunerations and holds the possibility of business expansion, so that factories would rather receive small lot orders at preferance. Upon gaining exposure at SD Factory, further new orders may be expected as well.
For example, a female office worker searched out a factory utilizing SD Factory, and established her own brand. A system for anyone with just an idea to realize any product could become a fact of life in the apparel industry.
For the moment, SD Factory aims to increase the number of registered factories or patterners. Additionally it plans to enhance functions including those for search or schedule management.
Nagamine concluded:
We hope new made-in-Japan products or brands will appear from retailers or designers utilizing SD Factory. That will also act as industrial stimulus. Moreover, our export sales support service called SD Export can provide the infrastructure for exportation.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
Yuki Sato
The Bridge
Yukari Mitsuhashi
