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Japan’s cloud-based accounting startup Freee raises $29 million in series C round

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Freee, a cloud-based accounting platform startup under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 3.5 billion yen ($29 million) from US-based VC firm DCM, Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), Japan Coinvest Limited Partnership in the series C round. With the latest funds, the company has fundraised 5.2 billion yen ($43 million) since its launch in 2012. See also: Japan’s accounting startup Freee raises $6M from Pavilion Capital and Recruit Holdings Japanese cloud-based accounting startup Freee raises $8M Japanese accounting startup Freee raises $2.7 million from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM At a news conference this July, Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki revealed that he aims to make his company a unicon, a startup worth over $1 billion. Cloud-contained society, a new product concept by Freee, was announced following the introduction of several initiatives by the Japanese government, such as the launch of e-Gov API (application program interface) and the national identification number system, as well as the change of the electronic form storage method for tax documents. These changes may accelerate the adoption of cloud-based systems into many business applications, encouraging many startups to focus on cloud-based services for businesses. Freee also aims…

freee-daisuke-sasaki

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Freee, a cloud-based accounting platform startup under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 3.5 billion yen ($29 million) from US-based VC firm DCM, Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), Japan Coinvest Limited Partnership in the series C round. With the latest funds, the company has fundraised 5.2 billion yen ($43 million) since its launch in 2012.

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At a news conference this July, Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki revealed that he aims to make his company a unicon, a startup worth over $1 billion.

Cloud-contained society, a new product concept by Freee, was announced following the introduction of several initiatives by the Japanese government, such as the launch of e-Gov API (application program interface) and the national identification number system, as well as the change of the electronic form storage method for tax documents. These changes may accelerate the adoption of cloud-based systems into many business applications, encouraging many startups to focus on cloud-based services for businesses.

Freee also aims to be a platform that supports small businesses. Using the funds, the company plans to develop services supporting a wider range of back office operations for small businesses. Freee launched a company foundation support service in June, followed by other menus like cloud-based accounting and payroll services. The company will launch a new service supporting the Japanese national identification number system for businesses in October, followed by supporting the change of the electronic form storage method by end of 2015.

Competition in this sector is heating up as many companies are shifting to cloud-based services. Sasaki explained how his company beats the competition:

Freee has the top share in Japan for cloud-based accounting, having accumulated much knowledge. In addition, we are the only company focused on cloud-based services for small businesses, which means our resources are focused on the targeted niche.

Based on all these factors, our designs for easy user operations are common in our all services. Many surrounding services will be integrated into the Freee accounting platform – taking a high share of the industry, which will also benefit our users.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson

Japanese scheduling and appointment booking solution Coubic raises $2.6 million

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Coubic, the Japanese startup best known for its scheduling and appointment booking solution under the same name as well as last-minute beauty salon booking app Popcorn, announced today that it has fundraised 310 million yen (about $2.6 million) from DCM and Gree Ventures. Upon the funding, former Goldman Sachs vice president Yuki Maniwa and DCM’s general partner Osuke Honda joined the management board, aiming to strengthen Coubic’s management setup and corporate governance. This funding follows their previous round securing about $500,000 almost a year ago from DCM and Gree Ventures, the same investors at this funding round. Since its launch in April last year, Coubic has acquired over 10,000 merchants using the booking solution. They will use the funds to develop additional functions like customer relation management. Maniwa was a classmate for Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka when attending his university. Kuraoka told The Bridge that he expects Maniwa’s business skills and vitality with the proven background.

coubic_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Coubic, the Japanese startup best known for its scheduling and appointment booking solution under the same name as well as last-minute beauty salon booking app Popcorn, announced today that it has fundraised 310 million yen (about $2.6 million) from DCM and Gree Ventures. Upon the funding, former Goldman Sachs vice president Yuki Maniwa and DCM’s general partner Osuke Honda joined the management board, aiming to strengthen Coubic’s management setup and corporate governance.

This funding follows their previous round securing about $500,000 almost a year ago from DCM and Gree Ventures, the same investors at this funding round. Since its launch in April last year, Coubic has acquired over 10,000 merchants using the booking solution. They will use the funds to develop additional functions like customer relation management.

Maniwa was a classmate for Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka when attending his university. Kuraoka told The Bridge that he expects Maniwa’s business skills and vitality with the proven background.

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 accounting startup Freee raises $2.7 million from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM

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Tokyo-based cloud startup Freee announced today that it has raised 270 million yen (approximately $2.7 million) in a series A funding from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM. This follows the previous seed round where the company secured seed funding of 50 million yen (about $523,000) from DCM back in December. Coinciding with this new funding, the startup rebranded its company name to Freee from CFO K.K., coinciding with the name of its accounting service. At the time of its launch back in March, CEO Daisuke Sasaki stated his goal of acquiring at least 10,000 users in its first year. Surprisingly it is way ahead of that pace, acquiring 6,500 users in the last four and half months, 1.7 times faster than expected. The startup originally planned series A funding for the end of this year but moved up its timeline to accelerate service expansion and user growth. With these new funds, the startup is expecting to hire additional staff and intensify its system development. According to Mr. Sasaki, their users have given them a lot of feedback, and they have been adding features and refining user interface based on those responses. He believes these efforts have helped them acquire many…

freee_new_logo-c3970ad3866dd25fda6b1c27779b6173Tokyo-based cloud startup Freee announced today that it has raised 270 million yen (approximately $2.7 million) in a series A funding from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM. This follows the previous seed round where the company secured seed funding of 50 million yen (about $523,000) from DCM back in December. Coinciding with this new funding, the startup rebranded its company name to Freee from CFO K.K., coinciding with the name of its accounting service.

At the time of its launch back in March, CEO Daisuke Sasaki stated his goal of acquiring at least 10,000 users in its first year. Surprisingly it is way ahead of that pace, acquiring 6,500 users in the last four and half months, 1.7 times faster than expected. The startup originally planned series A funding for the end of this year but moved up its timeline to accelerate service expansion and user growth.

With these new funds, the startup is expecting to hire additional staff and intensify its system development. According to Mr. Sasaki, their users have given them a lot of feedback, and they have been adding features and refining user interface based on those responses. He believes these efforts have helped them acquire many new users, and now his first priority is to form a responsive team.

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Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki

The company has three key topics that it will focus on moving forward: opening up to third-party services, easing collaborative work, and providing a better user experience. They plan to introduce an API that encourages third-party developers to connect with its platform, which should help the platform in terms of its collaborative capabilities. To improve user experience, they are expecting to introduce a native app for tablet devices to allow users to record and sort out their revenue and expenses regardless of where they are.

Some of our readers may recall that the company previously won the top prize at the Infinity Ventures Summit back in May, a conference hosted by Japan’s Infinity Ventures Partners. We’ve seen more than a few outstanding financial apps in the Japanese startup scene, and Freee can be considered to be among the best of them.

Japanese fashion e-commerce service Laso raises $2.1M from DCM

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Laso, a Tokyo-based fashion e-commerce retailer specializing in high-end clothes and outfits from around the world, has announced it has fundraised 200 million yen (approximately $2.1 million) from US-based VC firm DCM. The company expects to use the fund to improve site design, further system development, hire new employees, and create O2O (online to offline) marketing approaches. To differentiate the service from others in this intensely competitive field, the company has imported more than 200,000 items from 2,000 brands in 50 countries worldwide. Their buyers handpicked items to showcase in accordance with global fashion trends. They have no physical inventory of these items in Japan, so a user’s purchase will be delivered one or two weeks after placing the order. In its announcement, the company highlights how much potential there is in this business: The Japanese fashion market has not matured yet, where some foreign fashion brands are struggling hard to find market potential and other brands have been forced to give up continuing their business expansion. We wish to give consumers more opportunities to encounter wonderful global fashion items and make themselves feel close to the world. Laso was founded in 2006 by Masatoshi Murota who was previously on…

laso_logoLaso, a Tokyo-based fashion e-commerce retailer specializing in high-end clothes and outfits from around the world, has announced it has fundraised 200 million yen (approximately $2.1 million) from US-based VC firm DCM. The company expects to use the fund to improve site design, further system development, hire new employees, and create O2O (online to offline) marketing approaches.

To differentiate the service from others in this intensely competitive field, the company has imported more than 200,000 items from 2,000 brands in 50 countries worldwide. Their buyers handpicked items to showcase in accordance with global fashion trends. They have no physical inventory of these items in Japan, so a user’s purchase will be delivered one or two weeks after placing the order.

In its announcement, the company highlights how much potential there is in this business:

The Japanese fashion market has not matured yet, where some foreign fashion brands are struggling hard to find market potential and other brands have been forced to give up continuing their business expansion. We wish to give consumers more opportunities to encounter wonderful global fashion items and make themselves feel close to the world.

Laso was founded in 2006 by Masatoshi Murota who was previously on the board of directors for J-Word, which provided a web browser plug-in and an alternative to Google Search. It later acquired by Yahoo Japan and GMO.

laso_screenshot

How a Japanese stealth startup plans to push small business accounting to the cloud

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Tokyo-based startup CFO K.K. today unveiled a cloud-based accounting solution called Freee, a service that aims to set SME owners free from routine accounting. For such business owners to complete tasks that need to be approved by a taxation office, you need knowledge of commercial book-keeping. But this can be time consuming and usually is not possible on tablets or Macintosh laptops [1]. By synchronizing your account on this cloud system with web services provided by banks and credit companies [2], your payments will be transferred to the system with web-scraping technology and sorted into appropriate categories corresponding to the items you’ve purchased. The system also has a feature that allows you to print out a final return form for your income tax, which meets the requirement taxation offices in Japan. The startup is expecting to develop more features, adding an API to connect with third-party services, and optimizing browsing for multiple devices. CFO K.K. was founded in July of 2012 by ex-Googler Daisuke Sasaki and ex-Sony engineer Ryu Yokoji. They’ve been developing the service as a stealth project at their home, and fundraised 50 million yen (about $523,000) from notable US-based VC firm DCM in December. The startup’s CEO…

freee_new_logo-c3970ad3866dd25fda6b1c27779b6173

Tokyo-based startup CFO K.K. today unveiled a cloud-based accounting solution called Freee, a service that aims to set SME owners free from routine accounting. For such business owners to complete tasks that need to be approved by a taxation office, you need knowledge of commercial book-keeping. But this can be time consuming and usually is not possible on tablets or Macintosh laptops [1].

By synchronizing your account on this cloud system with web services provided by banks and credit companies [2], your payments will be transferred to the system with web-scraping technology and sorted into appropriate categories corresponding to the items you’ve purchased. The system also has a feature that allows you to print out a final return form for your income tax, which meets the requirement taxation offices in Japan. The startup is expecting to develop more features, adding an API to connect with third-party services, and optimizing browsing for multiple devices.

freee_screenshot2

CFO K.K. was founded in July of 2012 by ex-Googler Daisuke Sasaki and ex-Sony engineer Ryu Yokoji. They’ve been developing the service as a stealth project at their home, and fundraised 50 million yen (about $523,000) from notable US-based VC firm DCM in December. The startup’s CEO previously served as the CFO of a web company where he witnessed that the company accountants were always tired from time-consuming tasks. This prompted him to launch Free to address this problem.

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CFO K.K.’s CEO Daisuke Sasaki

It’s a freemium service, allowing you to share and manage the accounting records of your company with two other colleagues. All paid plans are available for free until June, as the startup hopes to acquire at least 10,000 SME in its first year. In this field of accounting services for SMEs, freelancers, and consumers, I can think of more than a dozen prominent players. Expect intense competition, and maybe some mergers and acquisitions in the not-so-distant future.


  1. Most of Japanese accounting software packages are intended for use on Windows PCs only.  ↩
  2. Regarding account aggregation, Freee can pull passbook or payment records from 15 financial institutions as of the time of its release.  ↩