THE BRIDGE

translation

Japanese CRM startup Sansan raises $14.6 million

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Sansan, the company that operates the business card-based CRM solution ‘Eight’, announced today that it has raised 1.46 billion yen (about $14.6 million) from Nikkei Digital Media, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), Energy & Environment Investment, and GMO Venture Partners [1]. According to a Nikkei report, Sansan plans to use the funds to expand its business in the US market. Sansan was launched back in June of 2007, and subsequently raised seed funding from Japan-based Incubate Fund. The company raised more than $20 million over four rounds, including this latest funding. In this space, we’ve already seen similar startups from the Asia region, such as Youlu in China and Remember in Korea. Nikkei Digital Media is a subsidiary of Japan’s economic news company Nikkei. Innovation Network Corporation of Japan is the country’s state-run initiative for investing in innovative activities and companies.  ↩

sansan-office-visit-2

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Sansan, the company that operates the business card-based CRM solution ‘Eight’, announced today that it has raised 1.46 billion yen (about $14.6 million) from Nikkei Digital Media, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), Energy & Environment Investment, and GMO Venture Partners [1]. According to a Nikkei report, Sansan plans to use the funds to expand its business in the US market.

Sansan was launched back in June of 2007, and subsequently raised seed funding from Japan-based Incubate Fund. The company raised more than $20 million over four rounds, including this latest funding.

In this space, we’ve already seen similar startups from the Asia region, such as Youlu in China and Remember in Korea.


  1. Nikkei Digital Media is a subsidiary of Japan’s economic news company Nikkei. Innovation Network Corporation of Japan is the country’s state-run initiative for investing in innovative activities and companies. 

Japanese e-commerce platform Base raises $3M from Global Brain

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See the original story in Japanese. Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company. According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned. Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October. We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied: There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items,…

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Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka

See the original story in Japanese.

Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company.

According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned.

Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October.

We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied:

There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items, I think we can target around 300,000 or 400,000 merchants on our platform. But if we consider independent creators as potential merchants, I think there’s no limit to our future growth.

Their t-shirt printing service on the platform got pretty good popularity among users. If they can acquire independent creators providing such services, then there’s a huge potential out there. From that perspective, their market may be overlap with other C2C focused companies in Japan like Mercari and Fril. The more their user base grows, then a variety of potential business model open up.

tsuruoka-at-new-office
At Base’s new office

Japanese mobile game giant Donuts invests in app developer Nagisa

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history. Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively. The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base. As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie…

donuts-on-glass

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history.

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Slide Movies

Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively.

The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base.

As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie app MixChannel through this investment.

Japan’s Actcat launches automated platform for reviewing code on GitHub

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based software development company Actcat announced yesterday that it has launched a source code review and bug detection platform called SideCI. It provides a continuous integration service aimed at reducing time-consuming work for system developers. The service can review a given Ruby on Rails project under development on GitHub, detects security holes, points out areas likely to contain bugs, and detects libraries in need of updating. When you push source code to a GitHub repository, SideCI will review it automatically. Using the dashboard provided, you can also easily check out how many discrepancies you have addressed and how many still remain. The team is planning to add testing and deployment features, as well as support for programming languages other than Ruby. They attended the pitch session at TechCrunch Tokyo 2013 and the sixth batch of Incubate Fund’s development camp program. The company is perhaps best known for having developed many web services and mobile apps in a range of programming languages and for different platforms. They plan to use this experience to improve the platform to better serve developers.

sideci_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based software development company Actcat announced yesterday that it has launched a source code review and bug detection platform called SideCI.

It provides a continuous integration service aimed at reducing time-consuming work for system developers. The service can review a given Ruby on Rails project under development on GitHub, detects security holes, points out areas likely to contain bugs, and detects libraries in need of updating.

When you push source code to a GitHub repository, SideCI will review it automatically. Using the dashboard provided, you can also easily check out how many discrepancies you have addressed and how many still remain.

The team is planning to add testing and deployment features, as well as support for programming languages other than Ruby. They attended the pitch session at TechCrunch Tokyo 2013 and the sixth batch of Incubate Fund’s development camp program.

The company is perhaps best known for having developed many web services and mobile apps in a range of programming languages and for different platforms. They plan to use this experience to improve the platform to better serve developers.

sideci-dashboard
SideCI’s dashboard

Japanese startup raises funding for a new kind of interactive news site

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese startup Byus today launched the beta version of its interactive news service. The company also announced that it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from Venture United, Incubate Fund, and Voyage Ventures. The news site was initially launched in alpha version back in July. Unlike other news sites, it lets you to ask other users about a specific news topic, with an article page for every topic generated through this Q&A back-and-forth. Each article page has links to other articles for related keywords, so you can easily explore topics you like. Overall, the service helps you understand a topic in depth, not only by exploring various factual information but also by hearing the voices of others. The news site prompts users to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ to read every topic. But often they might not know enough a certain topic to decide on whether to accept. So this is why the development team decided to pivot towards a Q&A-based site. They also introduced a bookmarklet which helps users easily adds topics they like and ask others for more details. We understand that an Android app will be introduced before this summer, and that…

byus_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese startup Byus today launched the beta version of its interactive news service. The company also announced that it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from Venture United, Incubate Fund, and Voyage Ventures.

The news site was initially launched in alpha version back in July. Unlike other news sites, it lets you to ask other users about a specific news topic, with an article page for every topic generated through this Q&A back-and-forth. Each article page has links to other articles for related keywords, so you can easily explore topics you like. Overall, the service helps you understand a topic in depth, not only by exploring various factual information but also by hearing the voices of others.

The news site prompts users to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ to read every topic. But often they might not know enough a certain topic to decide on whether to accept. So this is why the development team decided to pivot towards a Q&A-based site. They also introduced a bookmarklet which helps users easily adds topics they like and ask others for more details.

We understand that an Android app will be introduced before this summer, and that the company plans to acquire 30,000 registered users by September.

byus_screenshots

Task management tool ‘Jooto’ targets Japanese businesses

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See the original story in Japanese. While startups and freelancers tend to be more agile and flexible, they might fall behind in task management if team members work at different locations or have communication issues. There are a wide range of business tools out there for messaging or knowledge sharing, but we still find ourselves taking notes or writing on post-its and sticking them around the office. Of course, you can’t share updates with team members efficiently in this way. To address this problem, a new task management tool emerged earlier this year, featuring a beautiful graphical interface and drag-and-drop operability. It’s called Jooto. The development team has been improving the app based on feedback from test users since its launch of its closed beta back in January. The official launch was earlier this month. While the app is unique in its own right, the team behind it is also worthy of mention. They have their design and operations team in Singapore, system development in Hanoi, but they have chosen to target the Japanese market only. Interestingly their marketing team is not based in Tokyo, but instead on the remote island of Ishigaki, at the south-western end of the Japanese…

jooto_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

While startups and freelancers tend to be more agile and flexible, they might fall behind in task management if team members work at different locations or have communication issues. There are a wide range of business tools out there for messaging or knowledge sharing, but we still find ourselves taking notes or writing on post-its and sticking them around the office. Of course, you can’t share updates with team members efficiently in this way.

To address this problem, a new task management tool emerged earlier this year, featuring a beautiful graphical interface and drag-and-drop operability. It’s called Jooto. The development team has been improving the app based on feedback from test users since its launch of its closed beta back in January. The official launch was earlier this month.

While the app is unique in its own right, the team behind it is also worthy of mention. They have their design and operations team in Singapore, system development in Hanoi, but they have chosen to target the Japanese market only. Interestingly their marketing team is not based in Tokyo, but instead on the remote island of Ishigaki, at the south-western end of the Japanese archipelago.

Tomoko Devidal, the head of Nano Marketing who manages the app’s marketing efforts, told us why they operate in this way:

Since our app Jooto is developed for multilingual use, our global expansion is not so challenging from an engineering perspective. But since every startup has limited resources, we have to narrow our marketing focus. The app was developed by Skipforward in Singapore, a place where we couldn’t see a huge market opportunity. That’s why we decided on Japan as our initial target.

Despite the fact that they’ve not yet localized it to languages other than Japanese and English, they received some attention from internet users in Korea because of the highly intuitive user experience.

Japanese scheduling and appointment booking solution Coubic raises $500,000

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This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Coubic (pronounced ‘coo-bic’), which launched a cloud-based solution earlier this month, has raised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from DCM and GREE Ventures last week. Their app helps companies and retailers receive booking requests from their customers, as well as manage their schedules on any device. Some might say that using a simple web form would be an adequate way to collect booking requests from your customers. So how can Coubic can add value here? We had a chance to visit their new office in Shibuya to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka to find out more. Over the last few years, many startups have launched cloud-based services to serve business’ back office operations. Some of them include: Freee, Money Forward (accounting) BizNote Expense by CrowdCast (expense reimbursement) MakeLeaps, Misoca (invoicing) What’s unique about these services is that users don’t require technical expertise, and time-consuming work can be done even on tablets or smartphones. So what about front office operations? When companies or retailers set up an online form to receive appointment requests from customers, they typically use a web form and sort received…

coubic_featuredimage

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Coubic (pronounced ‘coo-bic’), which launched a cloud-based solution earlier this month, has raised 50 million yen (approximately $500,000) from DCM and GREE Ventures last week. Their app helps companies and retailers receive booking requests from their customers, as well as manage their schedules on any device.

Some might say that using a simple web form would be an adequate way to collect booking requests from your customers. So how can Coubic can add value here? We had a chance to visit their new office in Shibuya to speak with the company’s co-founder and CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka to find out more.

Over the last few years, many startups have launched cloud-based services to serve business’ back office operations. Some of them include:

What’s unique about these services is that users don’t require technical expertise, and time-consuming work can be done even on tablets or smartphones. So what about front office operations? When companies or retailers set up an online form to receive appointment requests from customers, they typically use a web form and sort received requests using a tool like Excel, and import them to SalesForce or other enterprise systems for customer relationship management. As for marketing, it’s also difficult to find an easy-to-use solution.

So there isn’t really any stand-out cloud service that lets businesses complete all their front office operations. This space is a so-called red ocean because there are many ways to address the problem, but many of solutions are not technically easy to implement. So the company has developed a solution that focuses on appointment reception.

Their users include a variety of business, including hair salons, yoga studios, cooking schools, lawyers, and accountants. Customers can book appointments on your Coubic page, typically linked from your own web site. If you have the Coubic iOS app on your mobile, you will receive a push notification when a customer requests an appointment. When you launched the app, you can make a follow-up call to the customer and add the appointment to Google Calendar. Kuraoka explained:

Coubic's Hiroshi Kuraoka
Hiroshi Kuraoka

The app’s user interface delivers a responsive web design to customers, so that they can book appointments on smartphones or tablets as well as via desktop browser. The dashboard for businesses is also available on mobile. You can complete every task on mobile, from setting up a reception page to managing appointments.

Their dashboard lets you view appointments, with each appointment associated with the profile of the customer that made it. So you can easily learn how many times a customer has visited your shop, or how many months have passed since the last visit. In other words, it becomes a CRM (customer relationship management) asset.

Back office operations are essential for any companies regardless of scale. Front office operations can help make make your business more profitable, but things will work even without them.

Cases studies
Case studies

Compared to cloud-based back office services like accounting SaaS, our service is less essential for business and so we can’t charge so much. That’s why we have to take a big share of the market. Appointment booking is needed everywhere in the world. […] So I think global expansion would be relatively easy.

With that in mind, their platform was already available in English and Korean as well as Japanese at the time of launch. They are exploring the possibility of global expansion beginning with Asian countries.

In this space, we’ve already seen BookFresh a service acquired by mobile payments processor Square back in February. But I think Coubic has no direct competitors even in the global arena. The funds from DCM and GREE Ventures could certainly help with their global business expansion.

Japanese cloud-based accounting startup Freee raises $8M

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Freee, the operator of a cloud-based accounting solution of the same name, has raised $8 million from two venture capital firms, including DCM and Infinity Venture Partners. This is according to a Nikkei reported earlier this morning. Prior to this funding, the company secured a $500,000 in seed round funding from DCM back in March of last year, and a $2.7 million series A round of funding from DCM and Infinity Venture Partners back in July. The total amount of funding to date has reached $11.2 million since the company’s launch back in July of 2012. For more information about the company, check out our brief interview below with their execs from back in October. In this space, their competitor Money Forward also raised $5 million from Jafco back in October.

free

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Freee, the operator of a cloud-based accounting solution of the same name, has raised $8 million from two venture capital firms, including DCM and Infinity Venture Partners. This is according to a Nikkei reported earlier this morning.

Prior to this funding, the company secured a $500,000 in seed round funding from DCM back in March of last year, and a $2.7 million series A round of funding from DCM and Infinity Venture Partners back in July. The total amount of funding to date has reached $11.2 million since the company’s launch back in July of 2012. For more information about the company, check out our brief interview below with their execs from back in October.

In this space, their competitor Money Forward also raised $5 million from Jafco back in October.

Japanese apartment search portal raises $1M

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This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Chintai Joho Co., the startup behind apartment search portal Cashback Chintai, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (about $975,300) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Their portal allows property agents to list apartments on a pay-per-performance basis, which doesn’t require them to pay any adverting fee until a contract is made with a tenant. If you agree on a contract for an apartment via the website, some ‘housewarming’ reward money will be given to you. At this time, the property company can be notified that a deal was been made via the website, because they are billed at this time. Since its beta launch back in November of last year, they have been rapidly growing, with over 1.2 million apartments listed during the busy relocation season last month. They plan to use the new funds to step up system development and marketing, as well as enrich the content on their website. The smartphone-optimized interface for the site will be launched early next month. Shifting an industry Some of our readers may aware that entrepreneur Shoji Endo is on the company’s board of directors. He launched…

cashback-chintai_featuredimage

This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Chintai Joho Co., the startup behind apartment search portal Cashback Chintai, announced today that it has fundraised 100 million yen (about $975,300) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain.

Their portal allows property agents to list apartments on a pay-per-performance basis, which doesn’t require them to pay any adverting fee until a contract is made with a tenant. If you agree on a contract for an apartment via the website, some ‘housewarming’ reward money will be given to you. At this time, the property company can be notified that a deal was been made via the website, because they are billed at this time.

Since its beta launch back in November of last year, they have been rapidly growing, with over 1.2 million apartments listed during the busy relocation season last month. They plan to use the new funds to step up system development and marketing, as well as enrich the content on their website. The smartphone-optimized interface for the site will be launched early next month.

Shifting an industry

Shoji Endo
Shoji Endo

Some of our readers may aware that entrepreneur Shoji Endo is on the company’s board of directors. He launched his first business while attending university, and subsequently joined Japanese job search company Livesense (TSE:6054) as director in its early stages. You may recall we reported last year about the acquisition of his previous startup DreamPass.

At Livesense, he deployed the concept giving users congratulatory money when they were hired through the company’s job search portal. It subsequently helped Livesense defeat many other job sites. Now he is bringing this idea to the property business.

Unique apartment portal model?

A performance-based revenue model using the concept giving users congratulatory money is not new. So why has no one tried it in the property business industry? According to the company’s CEO Isshin Kaneuji, it’s likely just how the industry works. Considering things from an accounting perspective, typical property agents have specific figures for how much they pay for each apartment search sites, regardless of whether that effort results in contracts. He explained:

Some estate agent franchisers buy and book ad spaces for affiliated stores. In some cases, this cost is included in a franchise fee that the stores will pay every month. Conversion-based billing is cost-effective for agents when listing their apartment ads, but it may be difficult for small stores to request their affiliating franchiser to change the fee scheme.

It will be interesting to see how their website evolves this space where other two big players (Recruit’s Suumo and Homes) still dominate.

Japanese travel startup Trippiece launches English version and a Singapore subsidiary

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base. Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English. Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around: To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners…

trippiece_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based travel startup Trippiece announced today that it has launched an English version to assist international travelers visiting Japan. Since its launch back in 2011, it has been serving Japanese users. Now with the launch of this English version the company hopes to establish a global user base.

Shuying-Yao
Singapore-based marketing manager Shuying Yao

Prior to launch, they established a subsidiary in Singapore, hiring Shuying Yao as overseas marketing manager. She will be committed to user engagement and marketing in Asian regions. They currently have no plan to serve languages other than English.

Trippiece allows you to create a travel plan and gather others who are keen to join. There is a troublesome chicken/egg issue when you launch on a web service of this kind. That is, if there are no travel plans on the platform, you cannot invite more users. And without users, you cannot have travel plans. The company’s founder and CEO Ian Ishida has learned a lot about this issue, having experienced it when they launched the original Japanese version. He explained how they will try to avoid it this time around:

To ensure the quality of the travel plans we provide, we will ask selected foreigners living in Japan to create their travel plans. If they can lead a tour, other foreign visitors will not need to worry about a language issue when taking that tour.

But if we depend only on our users’ efforts in having a solid collection of travel plans, we won’t be able to form a community of users. So we will make about 30 travel plans by the launch of the English edition. We’re not interested in how many international users we can acquire, but we aim to have 1,000 users traveling to Japan using our website six months from now.

In this space, we’ve also seen many competitors like Asoview, Voyagin, PlayLife, and Trip. Trippiece has a relatively long history, but how can they stand out from the others? Ishida explained:

Our uniqueness is that we create an opportunity for experience. A travel plan will be executed just once, in contrast with other services which usually sell their tours or plans multiple times. What we do is help users establish a social graph through travel, rather than just helping them travel.

Consequently, some of their users have voluntarily organized a club for diving lovers, for example. Others could find boyfriends and girlfriends through a tour they have attended.

In Japan, central and local governments have been committed to cultivating the so called MICE (meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions) market needs, with the aim of surpassing 20 million international travelers annually to Japan heading towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. With that in mind, Trippiece plans to acquire over 10,000 users who will use the website and visit Japan a year from now.