Tokyo-based WealthNavi, the company offering a technology-based asset management service under the same name, announced on Wednesday that it has fundraised 1.5 billion yen (about $15 million) in a series B round. Participating companies in this round were SBI Holdings, SBI Investment, Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, DBJ Capital, and Infinity Venture Partners.
Additionally, the startup has partnered with SBI securities and Sumishin SBI Net Bank, both of which are subsidiaries of SBI Holdings, to offer the robo-advisory service to SBI’s 2.6 million online banking customers plus 3.6 million stock trading customers. This funding means that the company has fundraised a total of 2.1 billion yen (about $21 million) since the company’s launch back in April of 2015.
WealthNavi offers a cloud-based robo-advisory service that helps middle-income people better locate diversified investments internationally. The service was officially launched in July this year.
It is said that SBI Group has been massively helping regional banks and credit unions nationwide in Japan adopt FinTech services since they are typically small and have few resources to catch up with the new trend unlike typical megabanks. Through the partnership with the financial conglomerate, WealthNavi also expects to gain access to a huge base of potential customers that these regional institutions possess.
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
In September, WealthNavi CEO Kazuhisa Shibayama delivered a pitch at the RisingExpo competition in Tokyo.
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. In early October, Digg CEO Gary Liu talked about the American firm’s newly-reborn services in Tokyo at Digital Garage’s headquarters. Emceed by DG Incubation Managing Director Takahiro Shoji whose company had recently invested in Digg, Liu made a quick stopover on his way back to the US from Southeast Asia for presentation of his views related to trends in Digg’s business sector. Shoji (who appeared sporting a Chartbeat T-shirt but more on this later) first outlined Digg’s background, as most of the audience was Japanese and unfamiliar with the old precursor news-curating site with the Digg moniker. In a nutshell the reincarnated Digg is today a messaging-driven media info supplier that threshes out content from cyberspace, selecting, indexing and ranking/clustering news that should as well as need to be read from 7.5 million articles or videos sourced daily. The Digg chief then laid out a convincing case of how media trends have shifted from Portal and Open Web to Mobile types, in reflecting the change of technology to the one centered on the smartphone. The jetsetting executive foresees the messaging…
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
Digg CEO Gary Liu (right) moderated by DG Incubation’s Takahiro Shoji (left)
In early October, Digg CEO Gary Liu talked about the American firm’s newly-reborn services in Tokyo at Digital Garage’s headquarters. Emceed by DG Incubation Managing Director Takahiro Shoji whose company had recently invested in Digg, Liu made a quick stopover on his way back to the US from Southeast Asia for presentation of his views related to trends in Digg’s business sector.
Shoji (who appeared sporting a Chartbeat T-shirt but more on this later) first outlined Digg’s background, as most of the audience was Japanese and unfamiliar with the old precursor news-curating site with the Digg moniker. In a nutshell the reincarnated Digg is today a messaging-driven media info supplier that threshes out content from cyberspace, selecting, indexing and ranking/clustering news that should as well as need to be read from 7.5 million articles or videos sourced daily.
Digg CEO Gary Liu
The Digg chief then laid out a convincing case of how media trends have shifted from Portal and Open Web to Mobile types, in reflecting the change of technology to the one centered on the smartphone. The jetsetting executive foresees the messaging apps taking center stage in business and social communications sectors henceforth as seen in the increasing popularity of list and write-around.
It was added by the American who took notice of the emcee wearing the name of the analysis tool handled by the Digital Garage group that his seven-person editorial team was harnessing the Chartbeat product to achieve much results. By leveraging such advances, Digg is gaining a proprietary and defensible operations model. This also was strengthened earlier in the year with the introduction of DiggBot messaging apps that avails a content search engine and a content push mechanism.
Digg now works with Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo devices
Digg thus hopes to transition from a publishing site to a global data-tech powerhouse while the Digital Garage group can expect to derive benefits beyond simple return on investments.
This is a guest post by Sabrina Sasaki, a marketing representative of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator Makers Boot Camp. The accelerator holds the Monozukuri Hub Meetup event in Kyoto on a monthly basis. Additionally, all photos in this article were taken by Kyoto-based systems biologist Tugi Guenes. On Tuesday, Makers Boot Camp joined a special Monozukuri Conference organized by Osaka City and held at Osaka Innovation Hub, getting together key players in the hardware ecosystem to introduce new trends for the next generation of entrepreneurs. The main lecture was given by Osamu Ogasawara, CEO of Tokyo-based hardware incubator ABBALab CEO Osamu Ogasahara. HWTrek team members Roger Wu, VP of Supply Chain, and Alan Jung, Business Development for Japan, brought their international expertise from manufacturing in China and Taiwan, and our CEO Narimasa Makino presented Makers Boot Camp partnership with Kyoto Shisaku Net, a group of over 100 local manufacturers that combined their business strengths to face daily industrial challenges, focused on their prototype expertise (Design for Manufacturing). The purpose of the panel discussion was to talk about new ways that collaboration in hardware can lead to a win-win business environment SMEs can benefit from. The main topic was introduced by Ogasahara,…
This is a guest post by Sabrina Sasaki, a marketing representative of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator Makers Boot Camp. The accelerator holds the Monozukuri Hub Meetup event in Kyoto on a monthly basis.
Additionally, all photos in this article were taken by Kyoto-based systems biologist Tugi Guenes.
L to R: Moderator Gen Tagaya (Business Innovation Center Osaka), Osamu Ogasahara (ABBALab), Narimasa Makino (Makers Boot Camp), Roger Wu (HWTrek), Alan Jung (HWTrek)
On Tuesday, Makers Boot Camp joined a special Monozukuri Conference organized by Osaka City and held at Osaka Innovation Hub, getting together key players in the hardware ecosystem to introduce new trends for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The main lecture was given by Osamu Ogasawara, CEO of Tokyo-based hardware incubator ABBALab CEO Osamu Ogasahara. HWTrek team members Roger Wu, VP of Supply Chain, and Alan Jung, Business Development for Japan, brought their international expertise from manufacturing in China and Taiwan, and our CEO Narimasa Makino presented Makers Boot Camp partnership with Kyoto Shisaku Net, a group of over 100 local manufacturers that combined their business strengths to face daily industrial challenges, focused on their prototype expertise (Design for Manufacturing).
L to R: Moderator Gen Tagaya (Business Innovation Center Osaka), Osamu Ogasahara (ABBALab), Narimasa Makino (Makers Boot Camp), Roger Wu (HWTrek), Alan Jung (HWTrek)
The purpose of the panel discussion was to talk about new ways that collaboration in hardware can lead to a win-win business environment SMEs can benefit from. The main topic was introduced by Ogasahara, part of his own experience as a serial entrepreneur, leading recent IoT trends in Japan, not only for ABBALab and the DMM.make ecosystem but also for Sakura Internet.
Ogasahara spoke about the challenges to start changing the common sense to a new market, focused on small and medium-size manufacturing industries and its specific needs. Just as the internet has revolutionized the information industry, manufacturing is following the digital age, and there are many opportunities available in the current industrial structure for SMEs to develop and adapt more quickly to the market’s new demands.
In addition to this movement, automation evolution and factories using 3D printers, such as the China movement of manufacturing-based entrepreneurs with a focus on gathering in Shenzhen, is massive and growing more and more, starting a new way of manufacturing: smaller lots, targeting customized products for connected devices.
HWTrek
The concept of connected devices and IoT (Internet of Things) leads to a range of new opportunities to solve most of our current problems: large corporations can’t handle them, as its structures are solid and change demands more time than our resources can wait. The solution then remains on small and medium enterprises, who must play an innovative role and be open to try new things out, as startups have been doing actively and constantly.
Alan Jung, Business Development for Japan, HWTrek
Roger encouraged entrepreneurs to invest time and energy talking to the new creators in order to try to find alternative applications for their own products and technologies: new projects are coming out, from many hubs in the world, as HWTrek platform has proven, and partnerships between creators and experts can lead to new approaches and different solutions.
The audience, composed by around a hundred SMEs, was interested to share insights about how to change the common sense and consider the new IoT market: a new business model for the manufacturing industry. During the networking session, innovative cases of new business in IoT were presented by HWTrek, to introduce creators that will come to Japan in November to network with local enterprises.
Roger Wu, VP of Supply Chain, HWTrek
Makers Boot Camp is co-organizing the next Asia Innovation Tour 2016 with HWTrek. The tour will start in Shenzhen on November 2nd and arrive in Japan on November 7th, with the following two events open to the public.
Osaka Innovation Hub: HWTrek Meetup – November 8th (Tuesday)
If you’re interested to know more about Design for Manufacturing, join our next meetup on October 12th at MTRL Kyoto, where we’ll make a direct bridge Paris-Kyoto, bringing Japanese and French makers and talk about ways to get ready for manufacturing.
See the original story in Japanese. The cities of Fukuoka and Bordeaux (France) recently agreed to encourage startup activities in the drone field, including interaction of startups or business mapping as a part of a three-year cooperation plan which starts from 2017. In Bordeaux, flourishing startups activities in the drone field can be seen, such as the largest drone event in Europe called UAV SHOW which is held in every October. In addition, a Bordeaux City’s extra-departmental organization Bordeaux Technowest manages four large-scale areas especially for drones’ test-flying, providing an ideal environment to promote growth of drone startups. Due to the conclusion of the cooperative relationship, Fukuoka-based TrueBizon, providing consulting service utilizing drone, will be invited to UAV SHOW 2016 being held from October 12th to 13th. Truebizon had been chosen to a Fukuoka startup support program for overseas development named Global Challenge! STARTUP TEAM FUKUOKA also, and will take part in a startup tour including a visit to San Francisco from later this October to November. Prior to this cooperation, Kyusyu Drone Consortium was established within Fukuoka Directive Council (commonly known as Fukuoka D.C.), which is an industry / academia / public-sector / government / private-sector platform located near…
Bordeaux city mayor Alain Marie Juppé and Fukuoka counterpart Soichiro Takashima signing the agreement
The cities of Fukuoka and Bordeaux (France) recently agreed to encourage startup activities in the drone field, including interaction of startups or business mapping as a part of a three-year cooperation plan which starts from 2017.
In Bordeaux, flourishing startups activities in the drone field can be seen, such as the largest drone event in Europe called UAV SHOW which is held in every October. In addition, a Bordeaux City’s extra-departmental organization Bordeaux Technowest manages four large-scale areas especially for drones’ test-flying, providing an ideal environment to promote growth of drone startups.
Due to the conclusion of the cooperative relationship, Fukuoka-based TrueBizon, providing consulting service utilizing drone, will be invited to UAV SHOW 2016 being held from October 12th to 13th. Truebizon had been chosen to a Fukuoka startup support program for overseas development named Global Challenge! STARTUP TEAM FUKUOKA also, and will take part in a startup tour including a visit to San Francisco from later this October to November.
Prior to this cooperation, Kyusyu Drone Consortium was established within Fukuoka Directive Council (commonly known as Fukuoka D.C.), which is an industry / academia / public-sector / government / private-sector platform located near the Fukuoka urban area. In the consortium wherein TrueBizon participates along with QTNet, NEXCO-West, FAS Eco Energy, Aso and DJI Japan, various efforts to drive drone utilization or business creation are seen being carried out, such as drone operator development including training of controlling out-of-sight drones, demonstration of drone IoT (Internet of Things) network including utilization of experimental radio base stations, and establishment of a cooperation system during disaster conditions.
The content of this article first appeared on Disrupting Japan. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of Disrupting Japan and the article’s author Tim Romero. Tim is a Tokyo-based entrepreneur, podcaster and author who has started four companies and led Japan market entry for others since coming to Japan more than 20 years ago. Tim hosts the Disrupting Japan podcast and is deeply involved in Japan’s startup community as an investor, founder and mentor. Kaneto Kanemoto founded OKWave to address a problem that was unique to the Japanese internet in the mid-1990’s. Most of the country felt the situation was inevitable, even natural, but Kanemoto-san knew it had to change. Although Japanese people are exceptionally polite in day-to-day interaction, due to the anonymous nature of the Internet, people behaved very differently online. In the early days, the mood was one of bullying, hostility and exclusion. Kanemoto-san founded OKWave to address these problems on the Internet in particular and in society in general, and he has succeeded remarkably at both. The Internet is a far more helpful and much more welcoming place thanks to him and OKWave. Tim: For those who don’t know, can you explain what…
Tim Romero
The content of this article first appeared on Disrupting Japan. It has been reproduced by The Bridge with the approval of Disrupting Japan and the article’s author Tim Romero.
Tim is a Tokyo-based entrepreneur, podcaster and author who has started four companies and led Japan market entry for others since coming to Japan more than 20 years ago. Tim hosts the Disrupting Japan podcast and is deeply involved in Japan’s startup community as an investor, founder and mentor.
OKWave founder Kaneto Kanemoto
Kaneto Kanemoto founded OKWave to address a problem that was unique to the Japanese internet in the mid-1990’s. Most of the country felt the situation was inevitable, even natural, but Kanemoto-san knew it had to change.
Although Japanese people are exceptionally polite in day-to-day interaction, due to the anonymous nature of the Internet, people behaved very differently online. In the early days, the mood was one of bullying, hostility and exclusion.
Kanemoto-san founded OKWave to address these problems on the Internet in particular and in society in general, and he has succeeded remarkably at both. The Internet is a far more helpful and much more welcoming place thanks to him and OKWave.
Tim: For those who don’t know, can you explain what OKWave does?
OKWave is Japan’s largest Q&A community. We have over 40 million active users who come to ask and answer questions about work and life, and even about love.
Tim: Really, people talk about their love life?
Sure. People ask “I’m in love with my boss. What should I do?” or “I’m having trouble getting pregnant, what can I do?” When we first started, we had a lot of IT-based questions, but as more and more non-technical people started using the Internet, there were more and more questions about everyday life.
Tim: OKWave is doing very well today, and you went from founding to IPO in only six years, but most people don’t realize what a hard time you had building the company.
I think my company built me as much as I built my company. I’m Japanese, but I was born in Japan with Korean nationality. No one knew or said anything about it until my parents changed my nationality in childhood. After that happened, my classmates leaned that I was not a natural-born Japanese, and I have a very hard time. I was bullied badly, even by kids that I thought were my good friends.
Tim: It must be hard for a child to understand what’s going in a situation like that.
Yes, I was 10-years-old then and I could not really image what prejudice was until I experienced it. My parents wanted the best for me, but no one knew about my nationality until after I become Japanese.
Tim: Many people say the being an outsider helps you think differently and can be an advantage as an entrepreneur. Was that the case?
I don’t think so. In my case I think it just made it hard to trust other people. I went to an Arts college and got a job as a designer at a good company, but I wasn’t happy there. I felt like they did not really appreciate or understand my design, so I left to find work in Tokyo. At the time I really wanted to work at Sofmap.
Tim: How did that work out?
Not well. My wife was very against the move and even threatened to divorce me. I left for Tokyo by myself, and due to my own mistakes in judgement, I ended up not getting the job, and I was actually living in a park for six months?
Tim: You were homeless for six months?
Yes. I was until I met a Chinese women who had moved to Japan and was trying to find work. I told her my story, but she didn’t feel sorry for me. In fact, she scolded me for being so weak. For not appreciating how easy I had things. For using little challenges and other people’s opinions as excuses for not trying. I was shocked at first, but I realized she was right. The next day I made some phone calls and got a very, very low-paying freelance job as a designer, but that was the start.
Image credit: OKWave
Tim: The start? How did that lead to OkWave?
I was soon designing web pages, but I didn’t really know how to do the job, so I went online to ask people basic questions. It’s seems natural today, but in the mid-1990s, people were upset. People told me to go away and said I had no right to waste their time with such basic questions.
Tim: That’s one thing that amazes me. Japanese people are very polite, but when they are anonymous on the Internet they can be pretty horrible.
That’s true, and it used to be worse. I decided then that I wanted to make a site where anyone could ask questions safely. At that time, no one thought it would work. Venture capitalists and private investors told me that there was no incentive for anyone to answer questions for free on the internet.
Tim: So you decided to use your own money?
Sort of. I went back to visit my wife who had stayed behind in Aichi for the past two years. I wanted to apologize and tell her all the details of my life in Tokyo, and maybe start over together. I told her about my plan. She thought about it, and gave me the money she had been saving those two years. It was enough to launch OKWave back in 2000.
Tim: Wow! That’s a lot of pressure. It’s one thing to lose investor’s money, but your wife’s savings?
Yes. [Laughs] Failure was not an option. Fortunately, the site grew quickly after we launched. People were attracted to a place where members were friendly and they could ask questions freely. After investors saw the model working, they understood it and Rakuten invested. Growth continued steadily and we were able to IPO. From outside it might look like we were able to IPO very quickly, but it was actually a very long road to get there.
It’s hard to believe that back in 1997 Japanese VCs could not even imagine the internet becoming an open and friendly place where people are willing to take the time to answer questions simply because they’ve been asked.
Most assumed the Internet would evolve to mirror Japanese business culture at that time, a collection of tightly-knit alliances and closed communities. The open internet is an obvious reality to us today, but Kanemoto-san deserves credit for not only seeing it before others did, but committing his life to making it happen.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Lang-8, the company behind a Q&A app for language learning called HiNative, announced on Wednesday that it has secured 200 million yen (nearly $2 million US) in funding. The investors in this round include Kyoto University Innovation Capital, East Ventures, and DeNA, as well as individual investors notably Chiba Kotaro and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron, in addition to multiple others. Details of the shareholding ratios and payment date have not been disclosed. Since its official launch back in November of 2014, HiNative has gradually assembled users, and as of the end of July 2016 it had reached around 200,000 registered users. “We can see a 500,000 users milestone within the year,” CEO Yangyang Xi said in a previous interview back in July. In relation to the number of questions and responses, which is of special importance to the Q&A app, as of the end of September there have been 960,000 questions asked receiving 3.4 million answers. The app supports 120 languages and gains user access from almost every country in the world. The company plans to use the funds raised this time around to strengthen their development system, as well as promoting marketing…
Tokyo-based Lang-8, the company behind a Q&A app for language learning called HiNative, announced on Wednesday that it has secured 200 million yen (nearly $2 million US) in funding. The investors in this round include Kyoto University Innovation Capital, East Ventures, and DeNA, as well as individual investors notably Chiba Kotaro and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron, in addition to multiple others. Details of the shareholding ratios and payment date have not been disclosed.
Since its official launch back in November of 2014, HiNative has gradually assembled users, and as of the end of July 2016 it had reached around 200,000 registered users. “We can see a 500,000 users milestone within the year,” CEO Yangyang Xi said in a previous interview back in July.
HiNative’s user growth
In relation to the number of questions and responses, which is of special importance to the Q&A app, as of the end of September there have been 960,000 questions asked receiving 3.4 million answers. The app supports 120 languages and gains user access from almost every country in the world. The company plans to use the funds raised this time around to strengthen their development system, as well as promoting marketing measures aimed at acquiring 2.5 million users by the end of 2017.
And so the story continues, with Xi having said in a previous interview, “Finally, we’re on track and growing,” to now, where he is set to advance to the next stage. He says that while they have to some degree seen verification of their growth, he’d like to improve the number of acquired users and at the same time qualities to retain them.
Xi explained:
As we thought, the more concurrent connections we have the better the numbers become, so first of all we’ll do our best to win over new users. At the same time, what we want to do within 6 months is increase the response speed. If we can get to where answers come within an average of 5 minutes, user experience would also significantly improve, so we want to focus on that from here on out.
Additionally, since his debut in 2007 as a student entrepreneur, Xi has continuously operated his social network for language learning, but unable to make any breakthroughs, experienced his share of struggle. As such, this is his first chance to take a large sum of funding to strengthen the system.
He continued:
Until now we have been working with 5 team members, but we would like that to become 10. In particular, we’re looking for engineers, 1 iOS specialist and one Android, as well as a designer, so those are areas we’d especially like to strengthen. Also, I am still doing the web design, so of course I’d like someone who could take that over.
In terms of business development, they will look for measures to attract YouTuber marketing to their ‘big hit’, as well as for managerial support similar to COO for Xi.
To begin with, Xi seeks to complete his goal of breaking through the 2 million user mark. He also discussed hopes of opening up the language learning contents stored on HiNative for searching capabilities (like Stack Overflow).
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
This is a guest post by Sabrina Sasaki, a marketing representative of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator 
Takeshi Hirano
