GREE Ventures has just announced the initial closing of its second fund. Dubbed the AT-I Investment Limited Partnership, this is a 5 billion yen fund (or about $50 million) which it will use to target tech startups in Japan and South East Asia, mostly series A stage companies at about 100 million yen to 300 million yen per company ($1 million to $3 million).
Investors in the fund include GREE Inc, SME Support Japan, Credit Saison, Ateam Inc, and Mizuho Capital. The announcement notes that a second closing will likely come later this summer.
The folks over at Tech-On have reported about some clever infrared sensor technology from Fujitsu that visualizes the movements of shoppers in a store. By using the recorded data, a store manager can gain insights into whether or not their product displays are effective or find out information about their in-store queues. The solution sounds somewhat similar to that of startup Locarise, which instead determines foot traffic metrics based on wi-fi signals collected from customers’ smartphones. Our readers may recall that Locarise was a special award winner at last October’s OnLab Demo Day. Via TechOn
Photo via Tech-On
The folks over at Tech-On have reported about some clever infrared sensor technology from Fujitsu that visualizes the movements of shoppers in a store. By using the recorded data, a store manager can gain insights into whether or not their product displays are effective or find out information about their in-store queues.
The solution sounds somewhat similar to that of startup Locarise, which instead determines foot traffic metrics based on wi-fi signals collected from customers’ smartphones. Our readers may recall that Locarise was a special award winner at last October’s OnLab Demo Day.
See the original story in Japanese. Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company. According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned. Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October. We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied: There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items,…
Base, the Japanese startup behind the e-commerce platform of the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen (or about $3 million) from Japanese investment firm Global Brain. Coinciding with this announcement, Global Brain’s Kazuhiko Fukayama has joined the company’s board and East Ventures‘ Takanori Oshiba was appointed as an auditor for the e-commerce company. In addition, the company also announced that former GMO Pepapo executive Hiroto Shin will also join the board as COO. Shin is perhaps best known for launching the e-commerce business Color Me Shop at his previous company.
According to Base CEO Yuta Tsuruoka, this funding was planned prior to their previous $2 million funding from CyberAgent. So they’ve succeeded in raising around $5 million as initially planned.
Tsuruoka tells us that they have acquired more than 80,000 merchants to date. That’s an impressive total, up from 50,000 merchants when we previously spoke with him back in October.
We asked him whether or not his startup can keep growing at a good pace, to which he replied:
There are 1.6 million retailers nationwide in Japan. If you consider the number of stores dealing with daily use items, I think we can target around 300,000 or 400,000 merchants on our platform. But if we consider independent creators as potential merchants, I think there’s no limit to our future growth.
Their t-shirt printing service on the platform got pretty good popularity among users. If they can acquire independent creators providing such services, then there’s a huge potential out there. From that perspective, their market may be overlap with other C2C focused companies in Japan like Mercari and Fril. The more their user base grows, then a variety of potential business model open up.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history. Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively. The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base. As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie…
Tokyo-based Donuts, a mobile game developer and the creator of the video app MixChannel, announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Nagisa. Details of this investment were not disclosed but it appears to be worth about $1 million according to Nagisa’s corporate profile and past funding history.
Slide Movies
Launched back in 2010, Nagisa operates a messaging app called Balloon, and previously raised 100 million (or about $1 million) from Nissay Capital. Subsequently, they also produced the photo effects app Kame Camera, the diary app Livre, and a virtual idol app The 49th Girl — all of which have surpassed five million downloads cumulatively.
The company also tells us that their movie app Slide Movies has acquired over 700,000 downloads in the two months since its launch back in December, and its monthly downloads surpassed 1 million in April alone. The company’s CEO Yoshiyuki Yokoyama told us that they are planning to expand their business to other sectors including C2C (consumer-to-consumer), fashion e-commerce, and games, thus making the most of their rapidly growing user base.
As an investor, Donuts is interested in that user base, and is exploring synergy around Donut’s hit movie app MixChannel through this investment.
Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon. Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users. Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland. Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.
Yesterday we told you about Mixi’s investment in Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. It turns out that this was not the company’s only recent activity in Taiwan, as it has also just launched a localized version of its hit mobile game Monster Strike. The Chinese name for the game is Guàiwu Dànzhū (or ‘Monster Marbles’) and currently it’s only available on Android, but an iOS version will be coming soon.
Mixi is partnering with So-net Entertainment Taiwan to launch and market the game in the region. A Monster Strike homepage has been launched at monster-strike.com.tw along with a ‘how to’ page for new users.
Interestingly the company is calling this its first overseas deployment of Monster Strike, so I’m going to interpret that as an indication that Mixi’s efforts to bring Monster Strike to mainland China via a partnership with Tencent have not yet come to fruition yet. I expect that perhaps Taiwan is a dry run of sorts before launching the game on the mainland.
Mixi has also announced that Monster Strike now has accumulated over six million downloads. We figure that this is still largely due to heavy TV advertising here in Japan, as we mentioned back in April.
I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178. Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August. The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform. The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers. Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site. via Mixi
I Mercury Capital, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121), announced today that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Taiwan’s Loyal Sun Holdings, the operator of Taiwanese recruitment site Job178.
Prior to this funding, the Taiwanese company raised funding (the sum also undisclosed) from Japanese investment companies Inspire and ICP last August.
The company charges advertisers based on a performance basis, so you don’t actually need to pay anything if you don’t hire anyone using the platform. As for job seekers, they can get a cash reward from the company when successfully hired using the platform.
The company has been rapidly growing and has acquired more than 3,000 Taiwanese companies as clients. This strategy is similar to that of Japanese recruiting site Livesense (TSE:6054), which has had promising results in terms of acquiring both advertisers and job seekers.
Interestingly, Job178 has been leveraging the Line messaging app for marketing and has successfully attracted more than 5.2 million users with their original Line stickers. Mixi has been running its own recruitment site ‘Find Job’, and is considering a possible synergy with the Taiwanese job site.
Rick Martin
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
