THE BRIDGE

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Japan’s HiNative Q&A app for language learning hits 3.4M registered users, raises $6M

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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 fundraised 650 million yen (around $5.8 million US) from YJ Capital, Daiwa Corporate Investment, and FFG Venture Business Partners, along with individual investor Kotaro Chiba. The payment was completed in August of this year. Other details, such as the investment ratios, were not released. As of August 2018 there are 3.41 million registered users on the HiNative app. This is nearly 17 times the amount related 2 years ago when we interviewed the company. According to Lang-8 CEO Yangyang Xi the current number of questions posed has reached 8.54 million and the number of responses totals 27,760,000. These numbers have also increased nearly tenfold compared to two years ago. See also: Japan’s HiNative, Q&A app for language learning, secures $2M to boost user growth Much as Stack Overflow and Yahoo Answers, it is desirable for Q&A services that provide open answers to offer both the “flow experience” where responses can appear immediately and the “stock experience” where answers close to a users’ query pop up on demand after searching. To elaborate on such services, when…

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Lang-8 CEO Yangyang Xi at his new office in Ebisu, Tokyo
Image credit: Takeshi Hirano

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 fundraised 650 million yen (around $5.8 million US) from YJ Capital, Daiwa Corporate Investment, and FFG Venture Business Partners, along with individual investor Kotaro Chiba. The payment was completed in August of this year. Other details, such as the investment ratios, were not released.

As of August 2018 there are 3.41 million registered users on the HiNative app. This is nearly 17 times the amount related 2 years ago when we interviewed the company. According to Lang-8 CEO Yangyang Xi the current number of questions posed has reached 8.54 million and the number of responses totals 27,760,000. These numbers have also increased nearly tenfold compared to two years ago.

See also:

Much as Stack Overflow and Yahoo Answers, it is desirable for Q&A services that provide open answers to offer both the “flow experience” where responses can appear immediately and the “stock experience” where answers close to a users’ query pop up on demand after searching.

To elaborate on such services, when I search for a phrase, in many cases it turns up owned content such as English speaking services on Skype. HiNative has reached a milestone because its search results are open, so the access to them will help the company to stand out in each country. Access to this web index is about 6 million unique users a month.

The company has a wide reach with 110 supported languages in 240 regions, and fast answers to questions posed via the flow experience appear in less than a few minutes. It has built up a community that is able to provide some form of an answer within an hour, and the knowhow garnered from Lang-8 is a big help here. The funds raised this time around will be used to further increase the overseas use rate, and to strengthen the management and development teams, which are currently consist of 10 employees, as well as to further strengthen the company’s marketing activities.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Japan’s HiNative, Q&A app for language learning, secures $2M to boost user growth

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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…

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Yangyang Xi, founder and CEO of Lang-8

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.

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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

HiNative: Giving language learners a handy way to ask native speakers

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Seven years ago, Tokyo-based entrepreneur Yang Yang Xi launched the language-learning platform Lang-8. He came up with the idea while studying language at Kyoto University. See also: Lang-8: The language learning startup that’s playing the long game His company, also called Lang-8, fundraised an undisclosed sum from Tokyo-based VC firm CyberAgent Ventures in January. Because startups usually fundraise to launch a new business or expand their current business so we’ve been interested in how they will take a next step from there. That’s exactly what we want to tell you today. A new product from Lang8, HiNative gives users who are studying a language an easy way to connect to native speakers of that language. Typical language learners often have to refer to a dictionary or consult a foreign language teacher to learn appropriate expressions. However, a dictionary takes a grammatical and a formal approach, which does not work well for daily conversation, and a teacher is not always around to help. HiNative is just the app to overcome these problems. It allows users the choice of one of four question templates to query a native speaker on the platform (see below picture). Users are notified of their answers to…

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Lang-8 co-founder and CEO YangYang Xi(喜洋洋)

Seven years ago, Tokyo-based entrepreneur Yang Yang Xi launched the language-learning platform Lang-8. He came up with the idea while studying language at Kyoto University.

See also:

His company, also called Lang-8, fundraised an undisclosed sum from Tokyo-based VC firm CyberAgent Ventures in January. Because startups usually fundraise to launch a new business or expand their current business so we’ve been interested in how they will take a next step from there. That’s exactly what we want to tell you today.

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A new product from Lang8, HiNative gives users who are studying a language an easy way to connect to native speakers of that language.

Typical language learners often have to refer to a dictionary or consult a foreign language teacher to learn appropriate expressions. However, a dictionary takes a grammatical and a formal approach, which does not work well for daily conversation, and a teacher is not always around to help.

HiNative is just the app to overcome these problems. It allows users the choice of one of four question templates to query a native speaker on the platform (see below picture). Users are notified of their answers to their questions via e-mail.

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You will set your native language(s) and the language(s) you are interested in when signing up for the service, so you will be requested to answer when another user puts a question on your language. The app is developed based on a responsive web design so you can comfortably keep using it on a smartphone or tablet as well as on a desktop.

Xi explained what has triggered his team to start developing HiNative:

With the Lang-8 platform, we initially thought that blogging is a good way to learn foreign languages with communication. But to keep blogging requires users to sustain a high motivation. While many web services have been shifting to mobile, blogging or writing a long story using a mobile interface is pretty difficult. So we had to develop something beyond the Lang-8 platform.

If a native speaker were standing next to you, it would be easy for you to ask him or her for a proper native phrase. But it’s not substantial. That’s why we developed HiNative.

Xi and his team have developed HiNative leveraging all the experience they’ve learned from the Lang-8 platform both in good sides and bad sides. Despite the fact that they launched the HiNative app as early as several months ago, they are already confident for user acquisition but are more focusing on tactics to improve user retention rate. Xi elaborated:

For a better user engagement, I think what users experience during their first visit to our service is a key. That’s why we’ve been running usability tests a bunch of times. Duolingo nicely marked 36 million downloads worldwide. But they are a content-based platform. We believe that a social network approach will be a main stream in the language learning platform. We aim to be the top platform in the social-based language learning category.

He added that the user active rate of the HiNative app is pretty better than that of the Lang-8 platform. In order to give users much better experience, they will launch an iOS app some day next month, as well as planning to start developing an Android version soon.

Japanese language learning startup Lang-8 secures funding from CyberAgent Ventures

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed. Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team. Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs: Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around…

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See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Lang-8, which runs a language learning platform based on peer corrections, announced today that it has raised funding from CyberAgent Ventures. The exact details of the funding were not disclosed.

Lang-8 has acquired over 730,000 users from 219 countries and regions around the world, with about 70% coming from outside Japan. According to the company’s CEO Yangyang Xi, they plan to use these funds to develop a new service, and add three more engineers to their current three-person team.

Xi initially launched the language learning platform when he was attending Kyoto University. Seven years have passed since then up until this funding. He notes that he has received much assistance from other entrepreneurs:

Many people gave me advice for fundraising, including, Kensuke Furukawa (Nanapi), Ryusuke Matsumoto (Community Factory), Kiyo Kobayashi (serial entrepreneur, ex-CEO of Nobot), and Taku Harada (Peatix). But since I was running a service with a small team, I wanted to keep doing it ourselves without fundraising. But we started to explore funding opportunities back last July, and got a good response. When I met with Koichiro Yoshida (Crowdworks), he told me to meet with all available VC firms around him and try to raise funds.

Takanori Yokoi (Increments) also gave me sound advice. I’ve been sticking to metrics and logic, but he told me I should speak with more courage and not sweat the small stuff.

Every time I talked with Xi, he tended to be a little nervous about doing something new, despite the fact that his service has great potential. If he kept going in this way, I think he wouldn’t be able to create a disruptive service. After this new fundraising, perhaps he will be more aggressive.

And while I can’t disclose too much at this time, he actually is preparing to launch a new service. We’ll take a further look at it when the time comes.

Meet the startups from Open Network Lab’s latest Demo Day in Tokyo

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Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below. From the sixth batch 1. Zenclerk ¶ Website: zenclerk.com We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event. 2. Papelook / Pape.mu girls ¶ Website: papelook.co.jp Pitched by: Ichiro Ozawa As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app. In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it…

Tokyo startup accelerator Open Network Lab, led by MIT Media Lab’s director Joi Ito, held its demo day event today. We had a chance to check out a wide range of startups, not only from this latest batch, but also from the program’s previous five batches. Here’s a quick overview below.

From the sixth batch

1. Zenclerk

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Website: zenclerk.com

We can’t disclose much about their business because they’re in stealth mode, expected to launch next month. But you can infer what they’re working on from their website, as well as this short introductory video (in Japanese). They did not pitch at the event.

2. Papelook / Pape.mu girls

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Website: papelook.co.jp
Pitched by: Ichiro Ozawa

As some of our readers may remember that we previously featured Papelook, a photo collage/cropping app that allows users to share your fashion snapshots with others. It has now passed 5 million downloads since its initial launch back in March of 2012, growing at the impressive rate of 500,000 downloads a month. Almost 50% of all Japanese female smartphone users aged from 15 to 29 are using the app.

In terms of differentiation from competing photo apps like Decopic and Snapeee, Papelook makes it easier to sort good pictures from bad ones, which should keep your camera roll from being filled with unnecessary pictures.

Papelook alone does not make much money, but it transfers users to Pape.mu girls, their cash cow. Pape.mu girls is a fashion app that presents a variety of pictures and updates curated from models’ blogs or fashion brands. The app has 250,000 downloads so far, with 500,000 active users generating six million page views a month. What’s most impressive is the retention time of their users, logging an astounding 50 minutes per visit on average.

In this way, the photo collage app brings users on board, which then creates opportunities for brands to promote products with the fashion app. The startup has already managed to partner with Fashionwalker.com, one of Japan’s largest fashion e-commerce sites. The company is planning business expansion to the US and Mainland China soon.

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3. Lang-8

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Website: lang-8.com
Pitched by: Yangyang Xi

Some of our readers may remember we featured Yangyang Xi, the founder and CEO of language learning platform Lang-8 in an exclusive interview back in February. The startup launched back in 2007 but since then has been operated by the founder on his own.

Mr. Xi was allowed to participate in the last batch of the acceleration program, hiring a CTO who previously worked at recipe sharing site Cookpad, as well as a designer.

With these fresh faces, Lang-8 has been seeing improvements in its access metrics. The growth rate of paid users is twice what it was a year ago, and revenue has almost doubled compared to a year ago. Business is finally in the black, and they can now begin developing a mobile app.

There’s no CGM-based language learning service using a mobile app, so that they expect to be on top of this space soon.

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From previous batches

1. Kiddy

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Website: kiddy-photo.com
Pitched by: Hiromichi Ando, Compath.me

Back in December of 2011, Companth.me’s co-founder/CEO Hiromichi Ando explained his first app to me in an interview. They’ve been developing a number of apps since then, and the newest one is Kiddy.

Parents typically want to record the growth of their children with pictures, but most would prefer not to share all those snapshots with people on social network platforms who they might not be very close to. To address this problem, Kiddy is a photo sharing app that lets parents to share snapshots of their kids within a family group.

The app was launched last January, and more than 1,000 households have signed up for it so far. Comparing to other photo sharing apps, the Kiddy app is showing good user retention, and the ratio of weekly active users among its entire user base is between 40% to 50%, meaning that about one in every two users makes use of the app at least once a week.

With the potential to generate a great lifetime value, the startup expects to enhance the app as a platform for sharing pictures among family members. They have several monetization ideas including photo printing, or new e-commerce services that propose that you buy something that fits the specific occasion/time of your photo.

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2. Voyagin

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Website: govoyagin.com
Pitched by: Masashi Takahashi, Entertainment Kick

This service initially set out to create a travel experience marketplace for tourists visiting Japan. But subsequently they enhanced their ideas to cover five Asian countries: Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. They are focusing on the Asian market because there are about 42 million travelers that hit region each year, with the market estimated to be worth over $4.2 billion.

Voyagin is planning to move its headquarters to Singapore by the end of this year.

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3. SpathSchool

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Website: spath.jp
Picthed by: Koichiro Sumi

This service is being operated a pair of developer co-founders. They are often asked by other developers to create smartphone apps, and were wondering why developers outsource development work to other developers. Finally they reached a conclusion. System developers in their 20s are familiar with programming languages like Objective-C or Ruby on Rails, but those in their 30s are better versed in conventional technologies like MySQL or Java.

With this insight the startup identified a sort of technology generation gap in the developer community. And it’s a gap that they aim to fill.

They’ve established set up a 20 to 60 hour lecture program for less experienced developers to learn about app development, and a range of related topics. They are also planning to providing some new courses for IT companies to train their employees.

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After all the presentations were made, Kaoru Hayashi, the CEO of the accelerator’s parent company Digital Garage, announced that the top prize at the Demo Day event was awarded to the aforementioned Papelook.

The Open Network Lab accelerator is now accepting applications for the next batch of its acceleration program. The deadline is May 31st at noon.

Lang-8: The language learning startup that’s playing the long game

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Lang–8, launched in 2007, is a language-learning platform in which users from different language backgrounds can socially correct each other’s writings. The CEO YangYang Xi started the service when he was 23 years old while studying at Kyoto University. Xi, born in China and raised in Japan, got the idea of the language-learning platform from keeping a diary, in which he asked friends to correct his own writings (in Chinese) when he was studying in Shanghai. Six years, half a million users later ¶ Skip to the present day in 2013, and Lang–8’s user base is about to reach 510,000, with the current active user rate at about 10%. The service is used by people in 190 countries, 70% of them from outside Japan. The primary users are business professionals. While the 500,000 user milestone is an impressive one, the company took more than a little while to get there. When asked about this six-year journey, Xi says he didn’t experience real growth until about a year ago, and that it took a lot of preparation to reach this point. Having started his career as a student entrepreneur, the first order of business was research and development. The service needed…

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Lang–8, launched in 2007, is a language-learning platform in which users from different language backgrounds can socially correct each other’s writings.

The CEO YangYang Xi started the service when he was 23 years old while studying at Kyoto University. Xi, born in China and raised in Japan, got the idea of the language-learning platform from keeping a diary, in which he asked friends to correct his own writings (in Chinese) when he was studying in Shanghai.

Six years, half a million users later

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Skip to the present day in 2013, and Lang–8’s user base is about to reach 510,000, with the current active user rate at about 10%. The service is used by people in 190 countries, 70% of them from outside Japan. The primary users are business professionals.

While the 500,000 user milestone is an impressive one, the company took more than a little while to get there. When asked about this six-year journey, Xi says he didn’t experience real growth until about a year ago, and that it took a lot of preparation to reach this point.

Having started his career as a student entrepreneur, the first order of business was research and development. The service needed to expand enough to be profitable. Initially Lang–8’s staff spent the majority of their time on site development and other technical elements. But two years after launch, Xi had a bit of a falling out with his engineer. Abandoned and left alone to nervously face 15 servers on his own, he decided that he couldn’t entrust his work to other people. That moment prompted him to make an effort to learn programming, and in the following two years, he learned development skills by interning at a friend’s company.

Interestingly, this period of personal growth for Xi coincided with strong user growth on the site as well – likely not a coincidence.

In 2009, Lang–8 received an angel investment of about 10 million yen from four private investors, including Nishikawa Kiyoshi of NetAge. In order to raise more funds, he will have to prove that Lang–8 has real growth potential. And that means addressing one key problem: smartphone support. Lang–8′s competitor busuuu experienced sudden growth as an iPhone application, reaching 1,9000,000 users. And while Lang–8′s userbase is not as large, its position as a social network is unique. If solid smartphone support is added, Xi believes it could become a serious competitor.

The other crucial point is monetization. Xi explained several of his ideas for controlling the corrections which play a central role in the service. For example, whether an entry receives corrections can be an issue. About 60% of English entries get corrected, as compared to 80% of entries in other languages. But a paid service could ensure that all entries are corrected. The jump from free to paid is never easy, but if that’s what users are looking for, it may possible.

Belief in an idea

Xi’s six-year journey from a struggling student startup to a community of 500,000 has certainly not been a glamorous one – although his persistence is certainly admirable. But compared to the explosive growth of social gaming and chat services in recent years, Lang–8′s growth rate might not grab the attention of investors.

Even with the recent improvement in user growth, there must have moments when Xi considered throwing in the towel. But he asserts, “I feel it has potential, and that’s why I can continue.” There are several entrepreneuers who are currently supporting him as mentors, and hopefully this can help with his plans to grow and expand his staff in the future.

That kind of unshakable belief in an idea is what has carried him this far. And with any luck, it’ll continue to drive him as he takes Lang8 to the next level.