Tokyo-based Creema, the Japanese startup behind C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace for handmade items under the same name, announced that it fundraised about 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) in the latest round led by Globis Capital Partners (GCP). For Creema, this is the fourth round following the previous 100 million yen funding from KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF for short, jointly operated by leading Japanese telco KDDI and VC firm Global Brain) back in June 2014. In addition to GCP, participating investors in the latest round were KDDI, Global Brain and SMBC Venture Partners, in addition to Creema founder/CEO Kotaro Marubayashi himself.
Launched back in 2010, the Creema marketplace lists more than 2.4 million handmade items from over 60,000 registered creators. While the handmade C2C market in Japan grew by 250% YoY in transaction volume, Creema revealed that they had seen a 450% growth from last year.
Currently the Japanese handmade market is fiercely competitive as it has in operation more than 40 marketplaces within. However apparently most deals are being aggregated into the top 4 marketplaces: Minne (backed by GMO), Tetote (backed by GMO), Iichi (backed by Hakuhodo group and Taiwan’s handmade C2C marketplace Pinkoi) and the amply-funded Creema.
Creema will use the funds to strengthen system development as well as marketing efforts for service recognition. They had been dependent for such recognition upon word of mouth among users, now expecting to hit 10 billion yen (about $92 million) in gross merchandise volume for 2016 (this number is coincidentally matched with that of competitor Minne).
According to Marubayashi, the average market price for each deal at Creema is over twice that at other marketplaces since users therein tend to trade handmade items with elaborate designs crafted by professionals. Recently Creema started dealing with food products where bakers and pâtissière sell their original breads or cakes while farmers sell handmade salad dressings and juices.
The consolidated annual merchandise volume from the two major C2C marketplaces of Japan, Yahoo Auction and Mercari, is to near the 1 trillion yen (or about $9.2 billion) mark by this yearend. Given that handmade item deals are included in these stats, we can see that the handmade item marketplaces still have a great potential for further growth.
See the original story in Japanese. Popcorn is a beauty salon-booking app for last-minute deals. The app offers discount deals up to 70% off for beauty salons for hair styling, nail art and care as well as eyelash extensions, in addition to relaxation and aesthetic salons, focused on allowing users to book a same-day or last-minute appointment for deals at salons in Tokyo’s busiest shopping districts such as Shibuya, Harajuku, Ebisu and Ginza. Since its launch back in February of 2015, the service is about to cover 1,000 salons, seeing an approximate 30% MoM growth in the number of bookings since late 2015. Coubic, the company behind Popcorn, announced today that the app supports a multilingual interface to better serve international visitors to Japan, ever on the increase. Available for Android via Google Play or for desktop in English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Korean, not to mention Japanese. According to Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), more than 20 million tourists are expected to visit Japan this year, especially those from the East Asia region like China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which accounts for 70% of all visitors, are increasing at more than 30% every year. Due to the…
Popcorn is a beauty salon-booking app for last-minute deals. The app offers discount deals up to 70% off for beauty salons for hair styling, nail art and care as well as eyelash extensions, in addition to relaxation and aesthetic salons, focused on allowing users to book a same-day or last-minute appointment for deals at salons in Tokyo’s busiest shopping districts such as Shibuya, Harajuku, Ebisu and Ginza. Since its launch back in February of 2015, the service is about to cover 1,000 salons, seeing an approximate 30% MoM growth in the number of bookings since late 2015.
Coubic, the company behind Popcorn, announced today that the app supports a multilingual interface to better serve international visitors to Japan, ever on the increase. Available for Android via Google Play or for desktop in English, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Korean, not to mention Japanese.
According to Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), more than 20 million tourists are expected to visit Japan this year, especially those from the East Asia region like China, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which accounts for 70% of all visitors, are increasing at more than 30% every year. Due to the increase of individual tourists and repeating visitors, their consumption is expanding from buying products to experiencing services.
Among many tourist attractions, more foreign visitors are choosing to try beauty salons in Japan because of a high interest in their health and Japanese beauty. When a massage salon in Ginza used the app, for example, the monthly number of foreign customers increased sevenfold from a year ago. After this year’s beginning, the salon says not only Asian but also European customers are increasing. With the launch of the multilingual interface at this time, it will attract foreign visitors with the convenience of enabling online booking and in-advance credit card payments.
The Popcorn app initially supported booking a same-day appointment only, but then added a next-day appointment in response to user needs. By offering a special limited menu, many beauty salons participating in the app use have succeeded in gaining repeat customers while more than half the customers delivered to salons by the app are repeat customers. It appears that users are tired in making phone calls to make an appointment, like those using the app to find a new salon and book an appointment.
Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka elaborated:
Some male and female users have used our app about 30 to 40 times in three months. It was so surprising that some users recognized the convenience of online booking and use our app very frequently. We thought some users may feel resistance against credit card prepayments but many of them appear to accept that in return for receiving a limited menu for Popcorn users.
Providing users with rewards from salons in Tokyo plus selected areas in Fukuoka so far, the company will expand to other cities in Japan shortly, planning to curate salons in cities outside Japan as well. Leveraging the Coubic appointment management platform, the company intends to expand their business to other retailing industries beyond beauty salons.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. Tokyo-based private broadcaster Fuji TV and online gaming giant Gree recently established “F x G VR Works (tentative name)” based on an agreement to collaborate in developing business and services including content production / distribution as well as platform construction related to Virtual Reality (VR). This project seeks to combine the strengths of the nationally-networked television broadcaster and Gree, which has game and Web development prowess in addition to having announced its first VR title at the Tokyo Game Show in September of 2015. In connection with such moves the Tokyo-based tech company established its GREE VR Studio last November. Moreover, it has also been a linchpin figure at the Japan VR Summit which was held on May 10th and gathered many of the leading-edge players in this industry. Furthermore it has just this April established an investment fund focused on VR start-ups in the Americas. It is said that VR technology can be applied not only to entertainment such as visual programmings and games not to mention theme parks but also may be applied widely to use in the…
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
Tokyo-based private broadcaster Fuji TV and online gaming giant Gree recently established “F x G VR Works (tentative name)” based on an agreement to collaborate in developing business and services including content production / distribution as well as platform construction related to Virtual Reality (VR). This project seeks to combine the strengths of the nationally-networked television broadcaster and Gree, which has game and Web development prowess in addition to having announced its first VR title at the Tokyo Game Show in September of 2015.
In connection with such moves the Tokyo-based tech company established its GREE VR Studio last November. Moreover, it has also been a linchpin figure at the Japan VR Summit which was held on May 10th and gathered many of the leading-edge players in this industry. Furthermore it has just this April established an investment fund focused on VR start-ups in the Americas.
It is said that VR technology can be applied not only to entertainment such as visual programmings and games not to mention theme parks but also may be applied widely to use in the medical and scientific research arenas. 2016 is said to be the break-out year for VR, with Oculus VR having started shipping in March of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) and HTC commencing its HTC Vive product from April. The Sony entertainment unit is also planning to begin sales of its PlayStation VR in October to further expand VR use.
Fuji TV is running from last year within the Fuji TV On Demand (FOD) integrated entertainment service its next-gen image distribution tech-based R&D endeavor “FOD Labo” which offers 360° panoramic VR content along with a 360° VR live performance coverage for the “Love music” TV program. With the collaboration, Fuji TV and Gree will henceforth create more opportunities to experience VR and help this market to develop further in this promising new field that could grow rapidly. For further info, access http://www.fgworks.jp (Japanese).
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore). With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions. If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission…
Tokyo-based Zawatt, the Japanese startup behind an online auction site for brand name items called Smaoku, unveiled today its international interface which enables foreign consumers to purchase authentic second-hand items from Japan. The new interface is available in English and traditional Chinese, aiming to serve buyers in the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore (though simplified Chinese is used in Singapore).
With the new interface for buyers, sellers in Japan can easily submit their items to foreign buyers in the same manner with they have been doing for buyers in Japan. In addition to eliminating language barriers by machine translation and a Q&A template for interactions between sellers and buyers, generation of documents for export customs declaration, international forwarding service and credit card payments (VISA and MasterCard accepted) are available. Buyers can easily accept inquiries and purchase requests as well as shipping their items to the aforementioned regions.
If sellers in Japan want to sell their items internationally, all they have to do is just toggle the ‘International Sales’ switch in their ‘MyShop’ menu in the mobile app. In international deals, a buyer is to bear remittance and shipping charges while 10% brokerage commission will be charged to a seller when his/her deal is made (5.4% discount rate applied for ‘official shop’ sellers) for domestic deals.
Zawatt fundraised about $2 million last June to focus more on international transactions just released at this time. Despite their having SIG Asia Investments from China invest through this round, it may feel slightly awkward that the aforementioned service area doesn’t include mainland China in the cross-border transaction surge.
According to Zawatt CEO Daisaku Harada, the company is still considering expanding into the mainland market because of high tariffs on luxury brand items, the need to locate servers within China (due to Great Firewall, narrow bandwidth as to overseas connections and ICP license requirement), different online promotional methods (since Facebook is unavailable in China), and different payment methods (people prefer to use UnionPay or Alipay rather than Western credit card brands). Seeing the response in the aforementioned four markets, he says that they will aim to start serving the Chinese market within the year.
I often see many events focused on cross-border e-commerce rather than ‘ordinary’ e-commerce across mainland China. Many cross-border e-commerce platforms deal with daily necessities or expendable supplies from outside China. The second-hand marketplace for brand items can be made because of the existence of Japanese consumers who carefully handle these items on the provision side. This particular segment of second-hand brand items can help Smaoku gain a competitive advantage over giants like Alibaba.
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund. The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years. Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation. In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well. No New Folk Studio (smart footwear) … See this article Exiii (personalized myoelectric hand) … See these articles Vinclu (smartphone accessory / hologram AI) … See these articles Symax (health condition analyzer inside toilet) … See these articles Fove (eye-tracking Virtual Reality headset) … See these articles Up Perfoma (footballer’s…
Japan’s ABBALab, a startup incubator focusing on IoT (Internet of Things) or IoE (Internet of Everything) business, last week announced the establishment of ABBALab IoE 1st Investment Limited Liability Partnership as its new fund.
The fund was formed with about 1.5 billion yen (about $14 million) in committed capital from investors including Mistletoe, Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020, Sojitz, Sakura Internet and angel investors. The redemption period of the fund is ten years.
Its investment target is not only hardware but also general products or services in IoT / IoE field, while covering wide investment stages from the prototyping stage or a pre-seed round to a series A round phase. Also follow-on investment will be considered according to the situation.
In ABBALab, CEO Osamu Ogasahara’s personal assets had been invested in IoT startups so far, with the investment targets being disclosed as well.
Upon fund establishment, I had an interview with CEO Ogasahara (all question in boldface asked by the writer, and answered by Ogasahara).
First of all, would you explain your activities so far? You had invested your personal assets in ABBALab.
During the past two years, I started ABBALab with Taizo (Son, CEO of Misletoe) as a profit-making corporation, and been involved with investment for prototyping or communication activities. Meanwhile, I have participated in starting up DMM.make AKIBA, IoT Platform of Sakura Internet or Japan Region of OpenFog. Those are all to set a ground from which new startups will be born.
The investment targets steadily increased. Was that within your expectation?
Actually, I could not have met any startups with impact other than my investment targets during the first year. While receiving a few requests for investment examination in one month, I might possibly not have been able to notice promising startups to invest in during prototyping phase with just my senses.
You had run an acceleration program once in ABBALab. Would you tell me the unsuccessful points of the program?
We formed a fellowship system to have businesspersons participate in the activities as mentors, but the cost effectiveness was bad because it was hard for them to work within the startups’ timeframe.
There was also a system to build teams anew by gathering failed startups. Could you provide actual examples?
There was no case where separated individual members had united into one. However, we found a case in which a team manufactured a concept model of a product in combination with a close team, of course with charges though.
How much do you evaluate that in score?
A 70. Although each startup is responsible for its own business, I think I myself could do more in terms of speed or number of matters as an accelerator.
Let’s move on to the topic about the new fund. The return on personal asset-sized investment may be a kind of community creation for example, which means just support. However, fund establishment will produce a financial business aspect. Could I ask you the reason why you formed the fund this time?
For example, it may be not so bad as a portfolio to continue investing a few million yen into 10 to 20 startups per year under the current style. However, even if only ABBALab was given excellent investment targets, there is no guarantee that a better environment would be formed in ten, twenty or fifty years later.
To deal with this, I noticed the need to change the system on the assumption of follow-on such as prototyping, seed and series A. Moreover, it is difficult to run ABBALab in such a style only with personal assets.
I see.
By only increasing the number of shareholders and raising money from them, I think our degree of freedom will be limited as a result, because we just have unlisted startups’ shares in the prototype phase (in most cases), for which valuation is difficult.
So you thought that simply forming fund is easier to understand than fundraising and investing as a corporation.
As for our result of investment activities, we had shown a not-too-bad performance for introduction to investors, where some of the invested startups had succeeded in fundraising during their next round, so that I came to consider raising money by forming a fund as ABBALab, not capital increase.
Is there any change with establishment of the fund?
What the good thing is, simply an increase of the amount and the possibility of follow-on, or possibility of collaboration or additional investment by LPs. By having more concerned people with the fund between us, we can contribute to the resource secure for startups through requests for assistance or mentoring that we have not been able to handle.
One point which will widely change is, when considering follow-on of tens of millions in scale, we have to share that with an advisory board in advance, because we invest the fund received from LPs, not personal assets.
What do LPs (limited partners) expect in addition to investment return?
Foxconn (managing Hon Hai venture capital fund 2020) had already invested in Fove, and Sojitz started supporting a deal with Symax. Also, Sakura Internet is working to adopt Tsumug’s products in home IoT business with Apaman Shop (Japanese rental housing broker).
See the original story in Japanese. Slush Asia website casinoceske.com took place on May 13th and 14th at the Makuhari Messe exhibition halls in Chiba. Among 60 nominees fiercely competing during the 2-day event, Taiwan-based SkyREC — which is developing an analytics platform for real stores — won this year’s startup pitch competition. Taiwanese startups won for two consecutive years following Slush Asia 2015 last year. Top award winner: SkyREC (Taiwan) Supplemental awards: Premium support worth 1 million yen from Google, 55,000 miles point from Japan Airlines, legal services worth $15,000 from the law firm Orrick and 1 million yen in cash from Autodesk SkyREC is a Google Analytics for real stores, allows users to understand how many times and also how long wherein the store customers have been gathing at the most. It will demonstrate a great capability in finding customer flow lines, hot-selling items as well as unpopular items with 12 different core analytics solutions. At a certain store in Taiwan, it could improve in-store customer traffic 10% and monthly revenue 18% after three months since implementing the SkyREC solution. Since its launch in December of 2015, the solution has been adopted by 400 stores, planning to be…
took place on May 13th and 14th at the Makuhari Messe exhibition halls in Chiba. Among 60 nominees fiercely competing during the 2-day event, Taiwan-based SkyREC — which is developing an analytics platform for real stores — won this year’s startup pitch competition. Taiwanese startups won for two consecutive years following Slush Asia 2015 last year.
Top award winner: SkyREC (Taiwan)
Supplemental awards: Premium support worth 1 million yen from Google, 55,000 miles point from Japan Airlines, legal services worth $15,000 from the law firm Orrick and 1 million yen in cash from Autodesk
SkyREC is a Google Analytics for real stores, allows users to understand how many times and also how long wherein the store customers have been gathing at the most. It will demonstrate a great capability in finding customer flow lines, hot-selling items as well as unpopular items with 12 different core analytics solutions.
At a certain store in Taiwan, it could improve in-store customer traffic 10% and monthly revenue 18% after three months since implementing the SkyREC solution. Since its launch in December of 2015, the solution has been adopted by 400 stores, planning to be deployed into 64,000 stores under 30 brands. This startup was born out of the 11th batch of Taiwan’s AppWorks accelerator.
Recruit Strategic Partners award winner: Giroptic (France)
Supplemental awards: 500,000 yen in cash and one-year free rent until September 2016 of TECH LAB PAAK co-working space in Shibuya, Tokyo
Giroptic has developed a camera device which enables capture of 360-degree motion pictures with three micro cameras and three microphones but without any software. In addition to Nokia’s Ozo exhibited in the Slush Asia venue at this time, images captured by three cameras are stitched into one 360-degree video stream in real time with an onboard chip. It can be livestreamed via Wi-Fi too.
Typical use cases include projecting images using a virtual reality-enabled head-mounted display (HMD) or browsing on desktop but users can swipe it directly or horizontally towards where they want to look at. It can be also attached to a light bulb socket and work as a 360-degree CCTV camera which enables image transmissions via Wi-Fi in real time. The team has received about 4,000 pre-orders at a Kickstarter campaign in France. Giroptic has 48 employees in France and San Francisco, and is currently funded at $6.1 million.
PR Times award winner: Meleap (Japan)
Supplemental awards: One-year complimentary use of press release distribution from PR Times
Meleap has developed a sports game environment called Hado, leveraging a combination of several technologies such as spatial perception, smartphone-based HMD and motion sensors. It virtually reproduces decorated rooms and townscapes for up to 10 users upon enjoying games or exercises. They will start with a B2B (business-to-business) model serving leisure and recreational service providers.
The following two finalists could receive no award but were attracting much attention from an audience and judges:
Vectr (Taiwan)
Vectr is a one-stop graphic design platform that has been integrated with markup editor, prototyping tool and other several functions. With a professional account paying $25 monthly fee, users can use create documents making the most of templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logs and illustration patterns provided on the platform. It also has editors and libraries for animated content, audios and videos as well.
Users can also sell their templates, icons, fonts, stock photos, logos and illustration patterns to other users through a marketplace. The company will take 30% of the price as a commission when the purchase is made.
MoBagel (Taiwan)
By collecting usage of IoT (Internet of Things) or “connected” home appliances, MoBagel provides consumer electronics manufacturers with business intelligence through a dashboard screen. It will help manufacturers understand usage or customer behaviors of their products. With this solution, manufacturers can grab statistics about how frequently their products are being used or demographics of their user base. Through the analysis, manufacturers can gain user insights that will definitely be useful for future product developments such as considering a suitable lifetime of batteries installed in their products.
Having partnered with Softbank, Philips, Panasonic and other consumer electronics companies, the company also secured $1 million in a seed round from 500 Startups, CyberAgent Ventures, SingTel’s Innov8 incubation initiative and Club Clover.