Japan’s Xenoma, body-tracking outfit maker, lands $1.8M after big success on Kickstarter

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See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Xenoma, developing a smart apparel product called E-skin, announced today that it has fundraised 200 million yen (about $1.8 million) from UTokyo Innovation Platform (an investment firm backed by the University of Tokyo) in addition to two existing investors; Beyond Next Ventures (BNV) and Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). This follows their previous 180 million yen (about $1.6 million) funding from BNV and JST’s SUCCESS Program.

Using the funds, the firm will strengthen their company structure so that they can receive orders for a customized version of the business-use product while aiming to develop an optimized technology to produce a low-price version for consumers.

E-skin consists of a compression-fit E-skin shirt with 14 stretch/strain sensors and a controller named E-skin Hub which is attachable to the shirt. These sensors are directly mounted on shirts, so that it is lightweight and can detect the user’s motion accurately. The controller has a 3-axis accelerometer and can monitor overall body motion without requiring Lighthouse or other 3D scanner motion capture devices.

The firm had been running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter from August 2nd to September 7th, where they made an amazing success by raising more than their initial target of $50,000 during the period.

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Edited “Tex” Pomeroy