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5 months after postponed IPO, AI-powered marketing bot developer Zeals secures $38M+

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Zeals is an equity-method affiliate of Freakout Holdings (TSE: 6094) and has developed AI-powered marketing bots for e-commerce companies and others. The company announced on Thursday that it has secured 5 billion yen (over $38 million US) in its latest round. Participating investors are the Japanese government-backed JIC Venture Growth Investments, Z Venture Capital, Japan Post Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. The sum includes debt financing from Mizuho nank and Mitsui UFJ Bank. Zeals was founded in April of 2014 with developing conversational robot software as its core business. In May of 2017, the company officially launched the Fanp chatbot management tool, but later pivoted to interactive advertising using chatbots. Prior to the latest round, they secured a seed round in January of 2015, a Series A round in May of 2017, a Series B round in January of 2018, an extended Series B round in April of 2019, and 1.8 billion yen in April of 2021. The latest round brought their funding sum up to date to over 7.65 billion yen (over $59 million US) including debt. Zeals’ solution allows users to purchase products while conversing with a chatbot, and has been introduced to approximately 400 companies with a total…

Image credit: Zeals

Zeals is an equity-method affiliate of Freakout Holdings (TSE: 6094) and has developed AI-powered marketing bots for e-commerce companies and others. The company announced on Thursday that it has secured 5 billion yen (over $38 million US) in its latest round. Participating investors are the Japanese government-backed JIC Venture Growth Investments, Z Venture Capital, Japan Post Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. The sum includes debt financing from Mizuho nank and Mitsui UFJ Bank.

Zeals was founded in April of 2014 with developing conversational robot software as its core business. In May of 2017, the company officially launched the Fanp chatbot management tool, but later pivoted to interactive advertising using chatbots. Prior to the latest round, they secured a seed round in January of 2015, a Series A round in May of 2017, a Series B round in January of 2018, an extended Series B round in April of 2019, and 1.8 billion yen in April of 2021. The latest round brought their funding sum up to date to over 7.65 billion yen (over $59 million US) including debt.

Zeals’ solution allows users to purchase products while conversing with a chatbot, and has been introduced to approximately 400 companies with a total of 4.3 million end users, which has contributed to analyzing 450 million conversation data sets (as of March of 2021). Leveraging the asset of these data sets, it enables user-oriented communication and supports clients’ marketing strategies.

Zeals’ IPO filing application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers was approved in November, however, the company soon postponed listing procedures due to deteriorating funding trends resulting from changes in U.S. monetary policy, IPO market trends, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company said it would make a new decision on when to resume the procedures after assessing trends.

In his recent “Note” post, Masahiro Shimizu, founder and CEO of Zeals, revealed that the company’s team has tripled in size from before the COVID-19 pandemic to about 300 people, including about 100 engineers, 80% of whom are foreigners. The company plans to focus on product development, NLG (natural language generation) development, and global expansion, aiming to deliver chatbot-based commerce solutions to 100 million monthly active users by 2030.

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Japan’s Zeals secures $3.9M series B round, offering conversational marketing bots

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See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Zeals, providing messenger-driven interactive ad service Fanp, announced on Monday that it had raised 420 million yen (about $3.9 million) from JAFCO (TSE:8595) and FreakOut Holdings (TSE:6094, hereafter called FreakOut) in its series B round. This round succeeds the fundraising for a total amount of 80 million yen (estimated to be series A around) conducted last May and the one for an undisclosed amount (estimated to be seed round) conducted in January of 2015. For FreakOut, it is a follow-on investment continued from the previous round. The total amount of investment in Zeals is considered to exceed 500 million yen (about $4.6 million). Zeals explained about the purpose of this fundraising is to enhance system development capacity, human resource including communication designer (a new job for designing the conversation between machines) or marketing through Fanp promotion activities and events. The Zeals team currently consists of 16 members (and 11 outsourced staffers). According to CEO of Zeals Masahiro Shimizu, the communication designers play a key role in the business related to interactive ad services as growth hackers for A/B testing-based growth hack tools. As the author wrote about Infinity Venture Summit (IVS) held last…

Zeals CEO Masahiro Shimizu
Image credit: Zeals

See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Zeals, providing messenger-driven interactive ad service Fanp, announced on Monday that it had raised 420 million yen (about $3.9 million) from JAFCO (TSE:8595) and FreakOut Holdings (TSE:6094, hereafter called FreakOut) in its series B round. This round succeeds the fundraising for a total amount of 80 million yen (estimated to be series A around) conducted last May and the one for an undisclosed amount (estimated to be seed round) conducted in January of 2015. For FreakOut, it is a follow-on investment continued from the previous round. The total amount of investment in Zeals is considered to exceed 500 million yen (about $4.6 million).

Zeals explained about the purpose of this fundraising is to enhance system development capacity, human resource including communication designer (a new job for designing the conversation between machines) or marketing through Fanp promotion activities and events. The Zeals team currently consists of 16 members (and 11 outsourced staffers). According to CEO of Zeals Masahiro Shimizu, the communication designers play a key role in the business related to interactive ad services as growth hackers for A/B testing-based growth hack tools.

As the author wrote about Infinity Venture Summit (IVS) held last December and there ZEALS won the 4th position, the firm had shifted the direction of development from the chatbot management tool to the conversational ads. Not a few web-based companies create landing pages for marketing. Unlike listing ads that aim to reach potential customers, in-feed ads linked to landing pages do not work effectively in most cases (Conversion Rate; CVR 0.8%).

Fanp (click to enlarge)
Image credit: Zeals

On the other hand, the Fanp platform transfers users from in-feed ads to messengers in order to reach potential customers, and then provides interactive ads by chatbot. Acquiring user profile, it can also follow withdrawn users and urge them to access repeatedly by shifting display timing or changing approach means. With this system, CVR can be improved to 5.7% by seven times that of landing pages. Fanp has taken up 82.7% of domestic share in chatbot service field utilized for advertising (as of December 2017). The accumulated number of messages between users and chatbots is more than 42 million and the sales growth rate in MoM (month over month) reached 136% during the past six months.

Zeals had been developing and providing two versions of Fanp in accordance with the degree of communication design (chatbot responses): normal version for general businesses and light version for media. However, the firm currently concentrates its development resource to normal version because the sales amount gained from conversion is higher in general businesses. The company has not revealed the number of its customer, but it includes excellent companies providing web services with high unit price for users, such as Atrae operating the job-advertisement media Green, Career Design Center operating the career change website @type, Advance Create operating the insurance information website Hoken Ichiba, Investors Cloud operating the apartment management platform Tateru, Ajinomoto’s marketplace of healthy drink Glyna and Parente, in addition to Wave Contact dealing with contact lens.

Zeals has commenced provision of a consistent service including in-feed ads from the securement of traffic path to user transfer, and is also considering a plan to create its own chatbot and transfer users to its advertisers using this in the future. In Japan, Indeed which was purchased by Recruit (TSE:6098) or Tenshoku EX provided by ZIGExN (TSE:3679) are leading players as web-based user-transfer media while Zeals may envision that it can dominate the chatbot field by a method similar to them.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s Zeals raises $720K+, unveils bot management tool for web media publishers

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See the original story in Japanese. It has been around one year since we last reported (in Japanese) on Zeals. The company, which stems from producing interaction software for robots such as Palmi and Sota, raised an undisclosed amount of funds in January of 2015 from Will Group (TSE:6089), a major human resource (HR) service company in Japan. Zeals announced on Thursday that they have raised over 80 million yen (about $720K US) from Japanese adtech leader FreakOut Holdings (TSE:6094). In conjunction with this, they pivoted from producing the API for creating chatbots called Bot Tree and re-launched it as the chatbot management tool Fanp. The company will collaborate with FreakOut on strengthening their sales, development, in addition to international expansion. While Bot Tree made a dazzling debut in May of 2016, according to Zeals CEO Masahiro Shimizu, there was a continuous struggle in providing the service. Thanks to the offer of a free trial, hundreds of media sites signed up, but on the other hand, the amount of sites leaving was also great. Shimizu, who felt there was a problem in the service, determined to improve it by working together with media companies. The company joined forces with Iid…

L to R: Yusuke Sato (COO, FreakOut Holdings), Nobuyuki Akashi (Executive Officer, FreakOut Holdings), Masahiro Shimizu (CEO, Zeals), Yuzuru Honda (CEO, FreakOut Holdings)

See the original story in Japanese.

It has been around one year since we last reported (in Japanese) on Zeals. The company, which stems from producing interaction software for robots such as Palmi and Sota, raised an undisclosed amount of funds in January of 2015 from Will Group (TSE:6089), a major human resource (HR) service company in Japan.

Zeals announced on Thursday that they have raised over 80 million yen (about $720K US) from Japanese adtech leader FreakOut Holdings (TSE:6094). In conjunction with this, they pivoted from producing the API for creating chatbots called Bot Tree and re-launched it as the chatbot management tool Fanp. The company will collaborate with FreakOut on strengthening their sales, development, in addition to international expansion.

Fanp
Image credit: Zeals

While Bot Tree made a dazzling debut in May of 2016, according to Zeals CEO Masahiro Shimizu, there was a continuous struggle in providing the service. Thanks to the offer of a free trial, hundreds of media sites signed up, but on the other hand, the amount of sites leaving was also great.

Shimizu, who felt there was a problem in the service, determined to improve it by working together with media companies. The company joined forces with Iid (TSE:6038), developing and offering multiple online media projects, to jointly develop services. After getting wind of this, major companies such as En-Japan (HR service company, TSE:4849), the Mainichi Shimbun (newspaper publisher), and Career Design Center (HR media company, TSE:2410) introduced Bot Tree on their media sites. Reflecting the opinions of such companies, Zeals set about making changes to the interface to birth the new and improved Fanp.

Just as The Bridge also distributes newsletters, general media sites often send out email newsletters in order to raise reader retention (actually, engagement more important than retention). In the beginning, the rate of recipients who open these email newsletters is never high. Zeals uses chatbots to guide messenger (Facebook Messenger) users and it is said that the average opening rate is 72%, with an average withdrawal rate of 7.2%. It is 15 times higher than the opening rate of average email newsletters.

When we look at the fee structure of Fanp we might be reminded of Line@, the messenging giant’s ad service plan for business users, but for now Fanp is only available with Facebook Messenger. Fanp generates a database based on profiles and attributes acquired from Facebook when the user begins to use their bot, and it also has a CRM (customer relationship management) function that allows the media owner to reach the user by specifying conditions.

Shimizu recently had an opportunity to listen to Hiroto Kobayashi, CEO of Japanese leading online media publisher Infobahn, and he became aware that the media of the future is an era of increasing the engagement of the audience rather than creating a vast and shallow audience.

Shimizu said:

All the media site owners want to do e-mail newsletters, but the newsletters can’t tell who the readers are or their preferences yet. SNS covers this to a degree, but even if you get a lot of ‘likes’ you might not be able to reach a large audience. There just isn’t any really good channel.

So, next time you’re going to try to make an app, the CPA to get people to download the app becomes high. Ultimately, it is the push notification feature that is useful with apps. If it’s just a push notification, can’t we do that with messenger? Then let’s try chat media on messenger. That’s our proposal.

Fanp’s dashboard
Image credit: Zeals

Fanp’s dashboard
Image credit: Zeals

In addition to launching Fanp, the chatbot management tool designed for online media sites, they also released Fanp Biz for enterprises. While Fanp strives for an alternative channel for attracting users with email newsletters, Fanp Biz is the one specifically for enterprises aiming to replace their product landing pages.

Shimizu explained:

Now that it’s possible to lead users to messenger with Facebook ads, we can also bring in the bots.

By letting the bot accept documents and make appointments, I think we can obtain an overwhelmingly better user response than landing pages do.

The chatbot introduced on Iid’s automobile-focused online media site Response

Previously Zeals was a strong advocate of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the development of conversational AI engines, but by switching to ”tap talk” (the user does not input text but instead selects the appropriate choice from multiple options presented in button form by the chatbot) between users and chatbots, they can minimize the resources needed for NLP development.

Shimizu added:

If we were still obsessed with natural language analysis like before, it would mean we’d have to develop in each language in order to go international, and obviously this makes it difficult to catch up with overseas competitors. ‘Tap talk’ is our way of overcoming this and moving towards international expansion.

At FreakOut there are many clients in Japan and abroad that use DSP (demand-side platform) / DMP (data management platform) and so on, and because they have headquarters overseas we have great expectations for international development, so that is what led to financing and collaborating with them.

When asked about their future development, Shimizu dropped the phrase “Communication Ad Platform”. This is when the media can use bots to round up readers, and perhaps next up on Shimizu’s plate is to monetize the next bot channel. There is a possibility that the media will be able to charge advertisers by having their bots relay advertising messages or by having them direct users to other sites (at the present time, there is no word from Facebook about regulating this).   

Zeals wants to deliver an experience of a hub of bots that can connects them each other to better serve users of Fanp and Fanp Biz.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda