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Japanese UX design firm Goodpatch raises $3.6M in series C to better serve FinTech businesses

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See the original story in Japanese. Japanese UX/UI design agency Goodpatch, based out of Tokyo, Berlin and Taiwan, revealed on Wednesday that they have raised 400 million yen (about $3.6M US) from SBI Investment (through SBI FinTech Fund) and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital in a series C round. This is the third round of funding for the company following $1 million (series A round) raised in December of 2013 and $3.5 million (series B round) raised in February of 2016. In addition to receiving the funds from SBI Investment, Goodpatch announced along with the funds raised this round that they are undertaking of a project to improve the UX/UI design of SBI Investment’s SBI Securities. From this month, Goodpatch launched an in house UX/UI design team specialized in the area of FinTech, and they are planning to open a lab to dispatch and share useful design and development knowhow to both the FinTech and design industries in the future. Goodpatch’s UX/UI portfolio in the FinTech world includes Money Forward’s public release in May of 2014, MYDC’s public release in January of 2017, and the public release of Quick’s Shinkly in 2017 (only those that are disclosed). Goodpatch was founded in…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese UX/UI design agency Goodpatch, based out of Tokyo, Berlin and Taiwan, revealed on Wednesday that they have raised 400 million yen (about $3.6M US) from SBI Investment (through SBI FinTech Fund) and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital in a series C round. This is the third round of funding for the company following $1 million (series A round) raised in December of 2013 and $3.5 million (series B round) raised in February of 2016.

In addition to receiving the funds from SBI Investment, Goodpatch announced along with the funds raised this round that they are undertaking of a project to improve the UX/UI design of SBI Investment’s SBI Securities. From this month, Goodpatch launched an in house UX/UI design team specialized in the area of FinTech, and they are planning to open a lab to dispatch and share useful design and development knowhow to both the FinTech and design industries in the future.

Goodpatch’s UX/UI portfolio in the FinTech world includes Money Forward’s public release in May of 2014, MYDC’s public release in January of 2017, and the public release of Quick’s Shinkly in 2017 (only those that are disclosed).

Goodpatch was founded in August of 2011. Prior to the company, CEO Naofumi Tsuchiya worked as an intern at San Francisco’s digital agency Btrax, and founded Goodpatch after returning home to Japan. The company’s name comes from the incubation space Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco. Their prototyping tool Prott, which was officially launched in October of 2014, has been introduced in major IT companies, startups, design farms, and so on.

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Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Base, Japan’s answer to Shopify, snags $14M to strengthen payment solutions unit

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See the original story in Japanese. As per some media reports, Tokyo-based Base, the Japanese startup behind an instant e-commerce platform, recently announced it has fundraised a total of 1.5 billion yen (about $14.4 million) from SBI Investment, SMBC Venture Capital and Suneight Investment. The details of the plan concerning the investment ratio or the payment date were not disclosed. The secured money will be spent upon hiring additional personnel in order to expand business for the e-commerce platform Base and the payment platform PAY.JP. See also: Japanese e-commerce platform Base raises $3M from Global Brain Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base raises $2M from CyberAgent Japanese e-commerce platform provider Base introduces new iPhone app Base: The Japanese freemium e-commerce platform that’s following Shopify’s lead Currently 300,000 online stores is open on Base and the number of PAY ID which works as customer ID reached 200,000. Therefore, the annual transaction amount now totals at tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) according to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka. There has been plenty of topics in this arena, such as one of the rival companies STORES.jp unveiling its new development to become a private-held company again; overseas competitor The Stripe’s…

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Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka

See the original story in Japanese.

As per some media reports, Tokyo-based Base, the Japanese startup behind an instant e-commerce platform, recently announced it has fundraised a total of 1.5 billion yen (about $14.4 million) from SBI Investment, SMBC Venture Capital and Suneight Investment. The details of the plan concerning the investment ratio or the payment date were not disclosed. The secured money will be spent upon hiring additional personnel in order to expand business for the e-commerce platform Base and the payment platform PAY.JP.

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Currently 300,000 online stores is open on Base and the number of PAY ID which works as customer ID reached 200,000. Therefore, the annual transaction amount now totals at tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of dollars) according to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka.

There has been plenty of topics in this arena, such as one of the rival companies STORES.jp unveiling its new development to become a private-held company again; overseas competitor The Stripe’s entering the Japan market in the financial sector including payment, investment and remittance; Coiney’s expansion into online business from its offline field; or, the appearance of AnyPay led by a serial entrepreneur Shinji Kimura.

The Bridge interviewed Tsuruoka about how Base which has succeeded in large-scale fundraising will compete in this era in a “warring nations.”


The Bridge: First of all, I would like to ask you about Base’s development plan. I am wondering if the pace of growth will become modest soon and whether you have any ideas such as strengthening sales promotion which targets enterprise merchants?

I assume you mean to ask if we are going to make something like a Rakuten (TSE:4755) or not. This is the same situation I think for STORES.jp. Regarding this point, we came to a crossroads about a year ago.

Sales promotion is a must-do in acquiring stores with hundreds of millions of yen sales, but it is more efficient to automatically acquire small stores with sales of less than millions of yen. I think that style befits the situation. Since the stores acquired through sales promotion could be stolen away by sales promotion, I do not want to compete in such a field.

From the perspective of being a technology company, I would like to take on the creation of a good product in order to form an ecosystem semi-automatically and make people happy through the power of technology.

base-screenshots

The Bridge: What was the purpose of launching a mall app?

It was to challenge selling products as Base. The way we were going, we could estimate where we would end up businesswise, so we decided to enhance the budget and human resources at that point in time. It is not still clear if that answer is the mall or the media but we will continue to strengthen those parts too.

The Bridge: Is it a method to attract a lot of customers?

It aims to gain customers who purchase products on the web once a month but could purchase them twice or thrice in a month because we cannot become a Rakuten or an Amazon. Rather, we provide a system of helping stores instead of us gathering people easily. Although the mall has an image as proactively gathering customers in general, I look upon our mall as a method of supporting management of stores after gathering customers.

The Bridge: I understand it is the policy to increase LTV (Life Time Value) under the current growth situation. On the other hand, Mercari — which invested in your company — has succeeded with the style of expanding its body size anyhow. It there any possibility of doing like that?

I think that it is a good idea to expand the body size eagerly as a challenge. Since it has become quite common recently for a customer who purchased a product to purchase it again at other stores, I think that is worth trying.

base-investors
L to R: Kazuma Ieiri (Co-founder of Base), Shintaro Yamada (CEO of Mercari), Yuta Tsuruoka (CEO of Base), Fumiaki Koizumi (CFO of Mercari)

The Bridge: What did Shintaro Yamada of Mercari advise you?

He told me to be on the offensive (laughing).

Based on the fact that Base is growing modestly and that there are only a few platforms grasping merchants as much as we do, he told us to take on as much challenges as possible. I received a lot of advice through information exchange using Mercari’s data that could be disclosed.

The Bridge: What was the advice especially helpful to you?

About organization. We had fully changed our company’s organization. Since initially any organization did not exist, we started reforming from this spring and have become a company capable of having a report line or more staffers.

My work content has also changed drastically. Although I had been in the very middle of the creation process until last year, I have moved to a more “upper” (executive-like) position now. I am not working as a communication hub by leaving responsible persons with the power of discretion to some extent. But I still cannot act like Shintaro who keeps staying in US for a long time (laugh).

The Bridge: What is the priority for your company?

Although the priority of recruitment was lower until last year, it has become a top priority now. With Mercari’s style spreading to us, we intend to form a new employee-friendly work environment. I had not been aware of the importance of recruitment well because I had been involved in our business since university. Mercari was the first external company for me, so that it was easy to absorb the culture.

The Bridge: How have you been with co-founder Kazuma Ieiri?

We meet three or four times a week even now, but he mainly tends to discuss his current project CAMFIRE rather than Base (laugh).

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Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka

Competing in the financial vertical

The Bridge: What is the most valuable number for you now?

Of course we make much of the total transaction amount which is growing to the hundreds of million dollars in scale annually, so we aim the next digit.

The Bridge: In the stage of the next digit, Mercari stands as a Goliath. Do you have any ideas about expanding business into the C2C field as a management person?

The business characteristics between us and them are completely different; the culture is different from the player in the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) arena, and the customers differ too. There are some elements in their products which can be a useful reference for us. However, originally we started our business with a theme how much we can optimize the exchange of value. Of course, it is no doubt that a drastic increase in the transaction amount is better, but it is highly doubtful whether it would lead to our company’s mission directly.

Some people say the C2C market has a higher potential growth than the SME one, but I do not agree with that. Look at Rakuten. It is huge enough.

The Bridge: As for payment business, the service directions are gradually being clarified, such as short-term loans, payments and remittances. What is PAY.JP especially focusing on?

Maybe I would start from payment service first. PAY ID is available for 300,000 stores and is linked to 200,000 users now. This is the situation I was looking forward to and I think it is a good timing as a whole.

The Bridge: Is there any rival company to watch out for?

Thankfully, we are faced with many rival companies in all time-periods (laugh).

The Bridge: I feel Mr. Kimura (of AnyPay) has a philosophy which seems close to ours. I suppose their direction is to replace trading with money to that using the Internet, so that could lead into the remittance and financial areas in the future.

We had focused on how much we can increase the number of merchants over the past three years. Now the team has separated into Base team for gathering stores and PAY.JP team for gathering consumers, and I think we have entered a new phase focused on increasing the number of consumers.

The Bridge: Thank you for your time today.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Send, data-driven food distribution platform for restaurants, secures $4M

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Planet Table, a ‘food tech’ innovator specializing in food delivery using big data, announced on Wednesday that it has fundraised about 400 million yen (about $4 million) from SBI Investment, Genuine Startups and Mistletoe. Details such as the payment date are kept private. This follows their previous $850,000 funding back in a series A round in January of this year. The company unveiled, together with this, that the number of restaurants using their farm products distribution platform Send (released August of 2015) has reached around 1000, with the number of food producers topping out at 3000. The funds secured this time around are being used to establish a new distribution center in Tokyo named “Gate Meguro” whose focus will be to expand the deliverable area, among other things, and also to take on the challenge of constructing a new logistics model. Additionally, Seasons!, a direct trading platform for food producers and buyers that was launched in June as a closed beta for authorized parties only, is set to open to the general public this fall. Over the next year and a half the company plans to increase the number of personnel from the…

The Planet Table team
The Planet Table team

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Planet Table, a ‘food tech’ innovator specializing in food delivery using big data, announced on Wednesday that it has fundraised about 400 million yen (about $4 million) from SBI Investment, Genuine Startups and Mistletoe. Details such as the payment date are kept private. This follows their previous $850,000 funding back in a series A round in January of this year.

The company unveiled, together with this, that the number of restaurants using their farm products distribution platform Send (released August of 2015) has reached around 1000, with the number of food producers topping out at 3000. The funds secured this time around are being used to establish a new distribution center in Tokyo named “Gate Meguro” whose focus will be to expand the deliverable area, among other things, and also to take on the challenge of constructing a new logistics model.

Additionally, Seasons!, a direct trading platform for food producers and buyers that was launched in June as a closed beta for authorized parties only, is set to open to the general public this fall. Over the next year and a half the company plans to increase the number of personnel from the current 20 to about 35.

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The Gate Meguro distribution Center

‘Cloudizing’ farm products distribution

Send, the farm products distribution service that carefully connects producers and users by their respective supply and demand data in an effort to solve the problem of food loss, will move toward the next big stage. To read more about the future aims of SEND please refer to the following article written last year.

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The investigation into whether the attractiveness of food made by producers of agricultural, livestock and marine products came across, and if there was a decrease in loss of opportunities for restaurants, etc. for their users, revealed that by a large number of interested parties welcome their distribution service. Planet Table CEO Shin Kikuchi responded thus:

Thanks to all the support, we have moved our center (previously in Shibuya) to Meguro. The one truck we had one year ago has grown to 8 trucks. To evaluate the restaurant side of business, at first there were many items to assemble, or cheap items.

There were a lot of these types of things, but gradually we moved toward never experiencing shortages, etc., and usability. On the producer side, we are getting the same products put into circulation before now bought at 1.2 times the price, one effect being customers have come out pleased with their price per acreage more than doubling.

Now, business is booming and the company receives so many requests, such as the desire by some to increase the meat services, that its finding it difficult to keep up.

send-truck
The outsourced delivery network is set to increase to 10 trucks this year

On the one hand, it takes time and effort for distribution. They posses the physical distribution center and trucks, and also an internet business with the commonly held notion with its forced management could create a contrarian environment, thus making it risky. Naturally, the increase of trucks and delivery personnel creates a heavy burden on management as well.

The construction of a virtual distribution network solves these problems. Kikuchi remarked from when the project was originally launched on whether an Uber inspired model might be a good choice or not. And now, in order to achieve this they are beginning delivery tests of an outsourcing format.

Maybe we can call it a delivery-sharing model. This model answers the problem of how to deliver efficiently in an urban area, so we are testing it with our outsourcers. To pick up regionally produced farm products, we can have them go around to venues such as Michi-no-Eki, or roadside stations across Japan. We’re trying various ideas.

To explain a little, the producers make a crop which must then be collected by a Send team member. It is easy to imagine how the system would be the best option for finding the most efficient route. However, then delivering the goods to restaurants will require some technique.

send-sausages
A dish of Sausages handled by Send. Kikuchi finds most products himself by traveling around Japan.

Kikuchi added:

We will share revenue from the sales restaurants buy from the deliverers. So, it’s not just just delivering goods that have been ordered, but requires presenting the goods to restaurants in an enticing way.

Here the data becomes key. The Send platform owns the data showing what kind of customer each restaurant is and what product they will want and when. So based on this information, delivery people can obtain the knowhow to make attractive propositions.

Production, distribution, and usage–place these three entities into the virtual network and the patform can provide the data to connect them together. Because the virtual network does not stick to any one of these resources, it becomes easy to scale.

On top of this, the team has also prepared measures to reduce loss that occurs at the time distribution. We will report the details of this at a later date.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Japanese accounting startup Freee secures $8.3M from SBI’s FinTech Fund, others

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TechCrunch Japan reported last week that Tokyo-based Freee, a Japanese startup behind a cloud-based accounting platform under the same name, has fundraised 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) from several investors including FinTech Fund, an investment fund recently launched by a subsidiary of Japanese financial service giant SBI Holdings (TSE:8473). In conjunction with the previous series C round funding in August, the latest funding means the company has fundraised 4.5 billion yen ($37.3 million) in 2015 to become the most-funded unlisted company in Japan last year. Meanwhile, SBI Holdings recently announced a strategic partnership with Yello Mobile, a Seoul-based conglomerate of Korean mobile startups, for cultivating FinTech businesses in Japan and Southeast Asia. Currently serving over 400,000 companies in Japan, the company announced in December that it has partnered with 11 Japanese megabanks including Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU) and Mizuho Bank, giving them an access to accounting data of SMEs and freelancers using the Freee platform upon their approval so that these banks can provide new financial services such as loans using the data for eligibility of expenditures. In contrast to a study by University of Oxford predicting artificial intelligence will replace many jobs including accountants, Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki…

freee-daisuke-sasaki
Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki

TechCrunch Japan reported last week that Tokyo-based Freee, a Japanese startup behind a cloud-based accounting platform under the same name, has fundraised 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) from several investors including FinTech Fund, an investment fund recently launched by a subsidiary of Japanese financial service giant SBI Holdings (TSE:8473).

In conjunction with the previous series C round funding in August, the latest funding means the company has fundraised 4.5 billion yen ($37.3 million) in 2015 to become the most-funded unlisted company in Japan last year. Meanwhile, SBI Holdings recently announced a strategic partnership with Yello Mobile, a Seoul-based conglomerate of Korean mobile startups, for cultivating FinTech businesses in Japan and Southeast Asia.

Currently serving over 400,000 companies in Japan, the company announced in December that it has partnered with 11 Japanese megabanks including Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU) and Mizuho Bank, giving them an access to accounting data of SMEs and freelancers using the Freee platform upon their approval so that these banks can provide new financial services such as loans using the data for eligibility of expenditures.

In contrast to a study by University of Oxford predicting artificial intelligence will replace many jobs including accountants, Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki does not think this will happen because accountants will be able to provide business owners with useful advice on business decisions by leveraging automated systems like Freee.

Edited by Kurt Hanson