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WordPress cloud service provider Sova raises $3M, launches freemium hosting plan

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.18

See the original story in Japanese.

Singapore-based Sova (named after buckwheat noodles in Japanese), the startup that provides cloud-based WordPress hosting service, announced last week that it has secured $3 million in a seed round. Details of the funds have not been disclosed, but it is understood they were raised from an angel investor in Singapore.

Why so confident?

Sova was launched back in December by Japanese engineer Miyako Itonaga (CEO/CTO) and serial entrepreneuer Takashi Fujimoto (CFO/COO). The company provides cloud-based hosting services focused on the WordPress environment, which allows them to save costs in engineering support for their customers but provide better experience. Fujimoto elaborated how they are trying to differentiate from competitors:

Typical service providers build their environment on Amazon Web Services because it’s easy. But if doing so, one remains upon the cloud service in the cost structure. So we developed our own cloud platform; service of the specification that our competitor WP Engine provides for $99 in the US is available from us for as low as $20.

Our readers may recall that his aforementioned company WP Engine recently $15 million in the US. We can expect that Sova to fare well in the Asian region because we’ve seen no competitors focused on such a niche space.

Adding multilingual options

Many of their users come from Japan and the Southeast Asian regions. To address a latency issue for them, the company’s cloud facilities are located in Singapore and Osaka, Japan. Using the funds raised this time, they plan to set up another facility in Palo Alto to prepare for their expansion to the US market and also add user support offices in Palo Alto and Indonesia to the existing locations in Singapore and Osaka. Fujimoto explained:

Since WordPress accounts for over 20% of all websites in the world, everyone knows how it’s sure to monetize. We’re still as young as six months old, but we’ve been receiving many takeover offers from companies like telcos in Asia and Silicon Valley-based companies expecting expansions to the Asian markets. But we have no intention to accept their offers for now.

Sova is also in talk with a undisclosed Japanese hosting company to provide a white label service for their customers. So you’ll be able to see a WordPress cloud hosting service branded with a major Japanese company pretty soon. The service is currently available in English and Japanese, but plan to add Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian, and Spanish to its language options next month.

Launching freemium hosting plan

Earlier this week, the company started accepting applications for their freemium hosting plan called Sova WP Free. Now that they’ve got the funds and a measurable number of paying users, so they thought it’s good to launch the premium plan to gain their awareness amongst potential customers. Fujimoto added:

It’s a freemium service but has a feature to boost the capacity of your environment to withstand up to 1 million daily page views. We’re developing our own ad network platform, which will enables blog owners using our service to monetize their content. It’s also available for mobile browsing. Typical WordPress templates are limited in its variety of design, but we will provide many templates using responsive designs and give users more choices.

We understand that they are trying to secure a series A funding worth an amount ranging from $10 to $15 million by the end of October.

I was curious about how Fujimoto have been working prior to this business. He told me that he started his own business while he was attending Kyoto University. Subsequently he launched an IT business and sold it over to a big Japanese IT company back in 2009. He’s busy flying back and forth between Singapore and Palo Alto for setting up their first office in the US.

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Japan’s crowdsourced housekeeping platform Casy fundraises from Beenos

Casy

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.06.16

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Casy (apparently pronounced ‘Carjee’), the startup offering crowdsourced housekeeping services under the same name, was officially launched today and also announced that it has raised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japanese startup incubator Beenos. Both husband and wife in more than 60% of all households in the country. [1] This situation has led to an expansion of the Japanese housekeeping market, which surpassed $960 million in FY2012 and shows nearly a 20% annual growth. [2] Despite the fact that more people think they have to keep a good balance between work and family, only high-income households are using housekeeping services since they can still be as expensive as $40 to $50 per hour. CaSy’s CEO Hiroki Ikeda saw a potential out there because he also has a child but both he and his wife hold jobs. He told us what prompted him to launch the service: I’ve used several housekeeping services, they typically asked me to sign many forms before closing the deal, and I was weary. I felt wary also because I couldn’t understand how they could try to match the personality of a housekeeper they arranged to sent me with…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Casy (apparently pronounced ‘Carjee’), the startup offering crowdsourced housekeeping services under the same name, was officially launched today and also announced that it has raised an undisclosed sum of investment from Japanese startup incubator Beenos.

Both husband and wife in more than 60% of all households in the country. [1] This situation has led to an expansion of the Japanese housekeeping market, which surpassed $960 million in FY2012 and shows nearly a 20% annual growth. [2]

Despite the fact that more people think they have to keep a good balance between work and family, only high-income households are using housekeeping services since they can still be as expensive as $40 to $50 per hour.

CaSy’s CEO Hiroki Ikeda saw a potential out there because he also has a child but both he and his wife hold jobs. He told us what prompted him to launch the service:

I’ve used several housekeeping services, they typically asked me to sign many forms before closing the deal, and I was weary. I felt wary also because I couldn’t understand how they could try to match the personality of a housekeeper they arranged to sent me with my needs.

Compared to existing services in this field, we were told that CaSy has three key differentiators:

Available for as low as 2,500 yen ($25) per hour – This was made possible by eliminating wasteful processes and improving operations.
Online booking available for 24 hours a day – You can complete your reservation within one to two minutes using your desktop or smartphone. (See Figure at right, click to enlarge)
Stringently selected housekeepers – The company conducts an interview with every single housekeeper before they hire him/her. You can ask them to show you the profile of a housekeeper before you order them to send you him/her. By doing this over again, the more times you use the service, the more accurately they can send you a housekeeper who is likely to fit your needs.

At the time of launch, available services include cleaning living room, bathroom, kitchen, etc. Starting with the central area of Tokyo, they plan to expand service area to more cities gradually and hire more housewives, etc. as housekeepers.

In commemorating the launch, the company is running a promotion campaign where you can get discounts when you or your friend sign up for the service. Ikeda finally explained what they expect to bring users through the service:

We want to assist busy families and working couples in their child care. We are aiming to give people more time with their family members.

According to a report by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. ↩
According to a report by Japan’s Yano Research Institute. ↩

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Meet Japanese entrepreneur trying to disrupt Thai recruitment market

Masaru Ikeda 2014.06.16

See the original story in Japanese. Some of our readers may know Japanese recruiting company LiveSense succeeded in IPO back in 2012 with the business model giving rewards to users when securing a new job using the company’s platform. This business model has been adopted at more than a few sites in this space, and such companies include Taiwan-based job search site Job178 which recently fundraised from Japanese internet company Mixi. Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now: We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She…

See the original story in Japanese.

Some of our readers may know Japanese recruiting company LiveSense succeeded in IPO back in 2012 with the business model giving rewards to users when securing a new job using the company’s platform. This business model has been adopted at more than a few sites in this space, and such companies include Taiwan-based job search site Job178 which recently fundraised from Japanese internet company Mixi.

Following this trend, Job Talents was officially launched back in March in Thailand. The service was launched by Yojiro Koshi who was previously working with Japanese mobile ad network company Nobot (acquired by Japanese telco KDDI’s subsidiary Mediba back in 2011) for their business developments in Thailand. He figured out that the new wave of innovation has not yet reached the Thai recruiting industry, and is trying to bring never-before-seen services to this space. Koshi told us how they plan to evolve their business from now:

We plan to add a feature that helps our users create their resumes. Because many people are not used to create a resume or have no custom to attach their portrait to it. We recently invited a Thai consultant to our team. She has been helping a lot of local people get employed again in Thailand. We will also give our users advice on creating a resume or an employment interview.

jobtalents-donuts — Japanese gaming publisher Donuts is hiring game designers for their local subsidiary in Thailand using Job Talents.

The company is currently a five-person team comprising of Japanese, Thai, and American staff. One of the biggest issues they are facing is that they are not able to roll out additional features and interface improvements so fast. In order to address this, they expect to raise money this summer for hiring new engineers, and are exploring funding opportunities for it now.

In this space in the Southeast Asian region, we’ve seen competitors like Jobtopgun (Thailand), jobsDB (Hong Kong), and JobStreet.com (Malaysia). Koshi is devoting himself to adjusting his service to the needs of the Thai job seekers, and he has receiving advice from famous Thai entrepreneur Natavudh Pungcharoenpon, CEO of Thai e-publication startup Ookbee which recently fundraised from Japanese system integration company Trans Cosmos.

Since its launched earlier this year, Job Talents has acquired about 1,000 job seekers and 100 companies, so they still need to work harder to show a more active presence amongst the Thai people. We understand that their marketing still depend only on Facebook ads Google Adwords, so I expect them to do it better making good use of the Line app which has the world’s second largest user population in Thailand.

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CyberAgent Ventures forms $50 million fund to invest in more startups

CyberAgent Capital

Junya Mori 2014.06.16

See the original story in Japanese. 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…

See the original story in Japanese.

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.

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In conversation with co-founders of Japan’s curated fashion site for young women

4meee!

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2014.06.15

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…

4meee1 — From the left: Tomomi Kuwayama (CTO), Arisa Sakanashi (director), and Yoshimi Kuwayama (CMO)

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 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.

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Japan’s growth hacking startup Kaizen Platform appoints new CFO

Kaizen Platform

Takeshi Hirano 2014.06.13

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.

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.