Japan’s Iemo secures funding from B Dash Ventures

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From the left: COO Yuji Kumagai, CEO Mari Murata

See the original story in Japanese.

Some of our readers may remember a few months back when we told you about the launch of Tokyo-based Iemo, a new curation media focused on interior decoration and housing. The company announced today it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from B Dash Ventures. Iemo will use these funds to step up its engineering efforts. Coinciding with this news, Japanese search engine expert Yuji Kumagai has joined their management team as COO [1].

The company was initially launched by well-known Japanese entrepreneur Mari Murata. In order to ensure quality content on their platform, they have established partnerships with interior manufacturers and architectural offices to collect high quality images, with the goal of helping users post curated articles more easily.

We understand that this approach resulted a corporate membership program which has now launched as well. Interior manufacturers can set up their own curated portfolios, and more than 30 such companies have signed up to date.

We were told by Murata and Kumagai that their growth curve shows an exponential increase. Almost 90% of their users are females who visit the website on mobile, many of them housewives (according to their user profiles).

They didn’t tell us specific user totals, but we’ll follow up on this when we get more details.

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  1. Kumagai founded his own company focused on the search engine technology a few years ago. He also once won a prize at a Facebook hackathon event with his app called Corollin’ Planet (currently unavailable)