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Japan’s ZenClerk, e-commerce revenue optimization platform, fundraises from SocialStarts

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Emotion Intelligence (previously known as DoBoken), the company behind a conversion improvement platform for e-commerce sites called ZenClerk, announced today that it has secured an undisclosed sum in a seed round from New York City-based startup investment fund SocialStarts. For Emotion Intelligence, this funding is followed by their angel round funding at the launch of the service last year. SocialStarts is a “venture fund family” founded by William Lohse, who previously served American IT news publisher Ziff-Davis Publishing as president, having invested in more than 130 startups including Tokyo Otaku Mode and FlyData from Japan. Born out of the sixth incubation batch of Japanese incubator Open Network Lab in spring of 2013, the team has been developing a solution to stimulate buying motivation of online shoppers. For e-commerce sites, one can analyze user behavior from smartphones and PCs by adding a one-line Java Script code into one’s website. Based on machine learning and data mining technologies, ZenClerk presents users with a discount coupon at the most appropriate timing and provides the potential customers with the extra encouragement to continue on to the purchase step. Emotion Intelligence Co-CEO Hajime Kuwayama spoke on the funding:…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Emotion Intelligence (previously known as DoBoken), the company behind a conversion improvement platform for e-commerce sites called ZenClerk, announced today that it has secured an undisclosed sum in a seed round from New York City-based startup investment fund SocialStarts. For Emotion Intelligence, this funding is followed by their angel round funding at the launch of the service last year.

SocialStarts is a “venture fund family” founded by William Lohse, who previously served American IT news publisher Ziff-Davis Publishing as president, having invested in more than 130 startups including Tokyo Otaku Mode and FlyData from Japan.

Born out of the sixth incubation batch of Japanese incubator Open Network Lab in spring of 2013, the team has been developing a solution to stimulate buying motivation of online shoppers. For e-commerce sites, one can analyze user behavior from smartphones and PCs by adding a one-line Java Script code into one’s website. Based on machine learning and data mining technologies, ZenClerk presents users with a discount coupon at the most appropriate timing and provides the potential customers with the extra encouragement to continue on to the purchase step.

Emotion Intelligence Co-CEO Hajime Kuwayama spoke on the funding:

Consolidating with the stealth period, we’ve been developing and offering the solution for about two years. We’ve been dealing with purchase behavioral data of e-commerce users leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in obtaining a great volume of knowledge and data that is sufficient enough to help our clients in gaining their conversion rates.

Going forward, we’ll be more committed to gaining the accuracy of our AI-based Emotion I/O engine, aiming to contribute to the further development of the e-commerce industry.

We have seen many competitors in this sector, such as Exitmonitor, Granify, Upsellit, Optimonk, PicReel, Yieldify, CartStack, and OptiLead, mainly from the US and UK where e-commerce businesses are vibrant. We will report on how Emotion Intelligence will compete with these other platforms in the future.

Edited by Kurt Hanson