Japan’s startup-focused investment firm CyberAgent Ventures announced today that it has formed a new fund worth 5 billion yen (about $50 million) called CA Startup Internet Fund No.2. This is because of closing their previous fund CA Startup Internet Fund No.1.
Comparing to the previous one worth about $24 million, the new fund is almost double in size and is planned for investment of an amount ranging from $100,000 to $1 million in every single startup they choose. The company’s vice president Tomoki Shirakawa explained how they plan to proceed from here:
We’ll keep looking to companies in the internet business space but planning to expand our coverage beyond it. I don’t mean we will lower a threshold. We’ll be on the lookout for interesting startups and try to discuss with more entrepreneurs.
Increasing opportunities to meet up with aspiring and active entrepreneurs is one of their focus. As part of such an effort, they will hold a meetup event called Startup Workout on July 2nd, where Takaya Shinozuka, CEO of Japan’s members-only hotel booking site operator Loco Partners, will share his success and failure experiences with an audience.
Shirakawa says his team is always looking forward to hearing from entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. So if you have any good idea in your mind, I’d recommend you not to hesitate to drop him a line.
See the original article in Japanese. 4meee! (obviously pronounced ‘for me’) is an e-commerce and curated fashion site for young women. Our readers may recall the team was featured at a recent demo day event of Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan. Since its launch back in April, the site has acquired more than 1 million page views mainly from teenage girls and women in their 20s. The service was launched back by three female co-founders at a startup called Rocket Venture, all of whom are in the same generation with their users. I recently had a chance to talk with the co-founders: CMO Yoshimi Kuwayama, CTO Tomomi Kuwayama, and director Arisa Sakanashi. What are differentiators? Yoshimi Kuwayama and Tomomi Kuwayama are twin sisters and have been working on entrusted web developments for their clients since they were attending a university. They co-founded Rocket Venture with CEO Makoto Tatsukawa who had been collaboratively working with the Kuwayama sisters. Prior to joining the team, director Arisa Sakanashi have been working with an e-commerce company for two years after graduating from a university. As curated content site focused on young women, we’ve seen competitors like ‘Mery‘ or ‘@Girl Times‘ in this space. But…
From the left: Tomomi Kuwayama (CTO), Arisa Sakanashi (director), and Yoshimi Kuwayama (CMO)
4meee! (obviously pronounced ‘for me’) is an e-commerce and curated fashion site for young women. Our readers may recall the team was featured at a recent demo day event of Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan. Since its launch back in April, the site has acquired more than 1 million page views mainly from teenage girls and women in their 20s.
The service was launched back by three female co-founders at a startup called Rocket Venture, all of whom are in the same generation with their users. I recently had a chance to talk with the co-founders: CMO Yoshimi Kuwayama, CTO Tomomi Kuwayama, and director Arisa Sakanashi.
What are differentiators?
Yoshimi Kuwayama and Tomomi Kuwayama are twin sisters and have been working on entrusted web developments for their clients since they were attending a university. They co-founded Rocket Venture with CEO Makoto Tatsukawa who had been collaboratively working with the Kuwayama sisters. Prior to joining the team, director Arisa Sakanashi have been working with an e-commerce company for two years after graduating from a university.
As curated content site focused on young women, we’ve seen competitors like ‘Mery‘ or ‘@Girl Times‘ in this space. But Yoshimi Kuwayama told us there’s some uniqueness including their four-panel comic strip style interface:
Our site is full of content generated by young women who are in the same generation with our users. So all articles on our website were written by these trend-conscious women. That’s why their real voices have been coming together here.
Addressing people’s inconvenience
In addition to the content they provide, the app has adopted a particular mechanism in order to retain their users better.
Firstly, the app allows users to post articles as well as read them using mobile. Sakanashi explained:
Young girls these days are surprisingly good at entering characters using smartphones. Unlike other curation content sites expecting users to post articles via desktop, we had to optimize our site for posting on mobile since we target such a demographics.
Moreover, when you find something you want to buy on the website, you can easily reach an e-commerce site through a link in the article. Tomomi Kuwayama explained why this is so important:
Fashion magazines feature many cute items but more than a few of them are less obtainable since they are certainly not yet on sale or stylist belongings. When you find something you want on our website, you can buy it right away.
Pursuing women’s usability
Tomomi Kuwayama explained young women are very sensitive and unlikely to miss any sense of incongruity:
If we look at e-commerce sites, we can find some products which are likely be described by male writers despite the fact that they target female users. I think we can figure out because the words that make women feel good are different from those attracting men.
Sakanashi added:
For example, if you talk about a celebrity woman, male people want to write about her style or appearance while female consumers want to know about her lifestyle or her accessories.
Yoshimi Kuwayama explained that female users are good at sharing ideas once they can find a perspective they can agree with:
Our website has a profile page where every user can introduce herself like her blog. This feature helps us motivate our users to keep posting their articles. Interesting articles are rapidly spreading via Twitter.
Working at startup
Their team is comprising of five full-time workers and three female interns. Some of our readers may recall a recent report that 27.9% of Japanese parents having new graduates will complain if their children choose to be hired by a young startup. So I wondered if they had no hesitate in working at this company which launched as recent as last December. In a response to my question, Sanakashi explained:
We can experience developing from scratch and every employee’s opinion is respected at startup. We can shape up our idea and get feedback in a short time, which suits me very well.
They are planning to introduce a mobile app in the future with the aim of supplanting positions of Yahoo Japan for female smartphone users.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup that operates web app A/B testing service PlanBCD, announced on Wednesday that it has changed its corporate identity and invited former investment banker Yuichi Shigeie as CFO. Prior to joining the team, he’d been working with JP Morgan for 13 years and also running the company’s investment banking operations as an executive director. Coinciding with this, Fidelity Growth Partners Japan’s David Milstein and Gree Venture’s Tatsuo Tsutsumi also joined Kaizen’s board of management. Our readers may recall Kaizen Platform fundraised $5 million from these investment companies back in March for business expansions to the US market. The company also changed its corporate logo at this time. The co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo told us a bit about what triggered them to invite the new CFO: We’re exploring funding opportunities from the global market. Furthermore, I expect him to better manage our team in Tokyo since I’ll be mostly based in the US from now on. We are professional in engineering but he has a background totally different from what we have. That’s why I believe his unique perspective will help us a lot gain…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based Kaizen Platform, the startup that operates web app A/B testing service PlanBCD, announced on Wednesday that it has changed its corporate identity and invited former investment banker Yuichi Shigeie as CFO. Prior to joining the team, he’d been working with JP Morgan for 13 years and also running the company’s investment banking operations as an executive director.
Yuichi Shigeie
Coinciding with this, Fidelity Growth Partners Japan’s David Milstein and Gree Venture’s Tatsuo Tsutsumi also joined Kaizen’s board of management. Our readers may recall Kaizen Platform fundraised $5 million from these investment companies back in March for business expansions to the US market.
The company also changed its corporate logo at this time. The co-founder and CEO Kenji Sudo told us a bit about what triggered them to invite the new CFO:
We’re exploring funding opportunities from the global market. Furthermore, I expect him to better manage our team in Tokyo since I’ll be mostly based in the US from now on. We are professional in engineering but he has a background totally different from what we have. That’s why I believe his unique perspective will help us a lot gain our management level.
It will be interesting to see how they fare in the US market and successfully gain funding from outstanding investors in the global market.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japan’s largest reward program operator Loyalty Marketing. Since its launch back in July, the startup has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that enables payment by credit card prior to picking up a product at the shop. Check out the video below to see how it works. Loyalty Marketing provides a reward and loyalty program called Ponta and gives over 60 million consumers in Japan discounts or rewards at about 22,500 retail stores from 103 brands. The company collects an enormous amount of consumer behavior data using the reward platform and helps brands roll out their better marketing efforts. Since before the funding at this time, Showcase Gig and Loyalty Marketing have been working together in developing a gamification app called Ponta Time. In addition, the ‘O:der’ app has adopted a payment gateway service from Loyalty Marketing for enabling…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based digital marketing startup Showcase Gig, the startup behind ‘O:der’ (apparently pronounced ‘order’), announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japan’s largest reward program operator Loyalty Marketing.
Since its launch back in July, the startup has been providing a suite of CRM solutions for small-sized retailers, comprising of two iOS apps, one for consumers and the other for merchants. The consumer app has a mobile wallet feature that enables payment by credit card prior to picking up a product at the shop.
Check out the video below to see how it works.
Loyalty Marketing provides a reward and loyalty program called Ponta and gives over 60 million consumers in Japan discounts or rewards at about 22,500 retail stores from 103 brands. The company collects an enormous amount of consumer behavior data using the reward platform and helps brands roll out their better marketing efforts.
Since before the funding at this time, Showcase Gig and Loyalty Marketing have been working together in developing a gamification app called Ponta Time. In addition, the ‘O:der’ app has adopted a payment gateway service from Loyalty Marketing for enabling users to pay on mobile.
Showcase Gig unveiled that they have surpassed over 100 merchants using their app this month. They primarily target female consumers in their 30s, but they think their user demographics will become more diverse as they get more various merchants. In order to better understand market needs, the company will need to learn more about consumer behaviors to keep providing appropriate services.
Showcase Gig’s CEO Takefumi Nitta told us Loyalty Marketing’s Ponta platform can collect detailed consumer profiles as well as typical sales records, allowing them to markedly define the demographics of different behavioral types of consumers. The two companies will work closely to develop a smash-hit service in the O2O (online-to-offline) space.
See the original story in Japanese. Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Our readers may recall our advisor Kiyo Kobayashi spoke with CEO Satoshi Sugie at their office in Silicon Valley. The company launched a kickstarter campaign with its goal of $30,000, so you can gain opportunities like the privilege to attend their driving test and obtaining a t-shirt of their design if you invest. If you invest more than $10,000, you can obtain the Kickstarter version of the wheelchair product. The project already surpassed $10,000 in as short as six hours since its launch at noon today (Japan time). The team won the top prize at the Launch Pad session at Infinity Venture Summit 2014 Spring which took place in Sapporo back in May, where Takao Ozawa, one of judges at the session, promised that he would definitely buy it. [1] Post by Takao Ozawa. I wondered why they launched this Kickstarter campaign at this time, since typical crowdfunding projects are used for fundraising to develop a prototype but they have already completed it. In a response to my question regarding that point, Sugie explained it’s a topical gimmick to attract consumers in…
Whill is a Japanese startup that is currently developing a next-generation wheelchair. Our readers may recall our advisor Kiyo Kobayashi spoke with CEO Satoshi Sugie at their office in Silicon Valley. The company launched a kickstarter campaign with its goal of $30,000, so you can gain opportunities like the privilege to attend their driving test and obtaining a t-shirt of their design if you invest.
If you invest more than $10,000, you can obtain the Kickstarter version of the wheelchair product. The project already surpassed $10,000 in as short as six hours since its launch at noon today (Japan time).
The team won the top prize at the Launch Pad session at Infinity Venture Summit 2014 Spring which took place in Sapporo back in May, where Takao Ozawa, one of judges at the session, promised that he would definitely buy it. [1]
I wondered why they launched this Kickstarter campaign at this time, since typical crowdfunding projects are used for fundraising to develop a prototype but they have already completed it.
In a response to my question regarding that point, Sugie explained it’s a topical gimmick to attract consumers in the US market. It is interesting to see how much a crowdfunding project can help a startup like them market or promote their product.
Takao Ozawa is the COO at YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan. ↩
Tokyo-based mobile app developer Ignis announced yesterday that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Market. The company will be listed on July 15th. Since its launch back in May of 2010, the company has surpassed over 50 million downloads by attracting users with more than 75 apps for iOS and Android. Their best selling apps include ‘AKB48 virtual phone’ ( iOS / Android ) which delivers new voice messages from the members of Japanese pop singer group AKB48 every month and allows you to enjoy listening to their messages in a way like talking over the phone with someone. Via IT Media, Venture Now
From the left: CEO Kon Sen, CTO Takaaki Suzuki (Image from Ignis’ website)
Tokyo-based mobile app developer Ignis announced yesterday that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers Market. The company will be listed on July 15th.
Since its launch back in May of 2010, the company has surpassed over 50 million downloads by attracting users with more than 75 apps for iOS and Android.
Their best selling apps include ‘AKB48 virtual phone’ ( iOS / Android ) which delivers new voice messages from the members of Japanese pop singer group AKB48 every month and allows you to enjoy listening to their messages in a way like talking over the phone with someone.
Junya Mori
Yukari Mitsuhashi
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
