Japan’s CRM startup Sansan expands to Singapore, aiming to better serve Asian markets

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Tokyo-based Sansan, the company that operates the business card-based CRM solutions, announced today that it has officially launched its premium service for business ‘Sansan’ in Singapore. In terms of their global service expansion, Singapore is the second country after the US where the CRM platform was launched back in late May.

Sansan provides a combined solution for business card scanning, data entry, and contact management, so that you can easily share the profiles of your clients with your colleagues. Since the service’s recent launch back in the US, they have received hundreds of inquiries about launching the service in Asian countries, so they launched a beta version in Singapore in July. During the last two months since the launch of the English version, they have successfully acquired over 300 business users from the US and Singaporean markets.

Sansan CEO Chika Terada explained about what’s behind about this expansion:

Our aim is to provide our premium service for over 100 new clients in three months. […] We plan to expand into other English-speaking countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and Hong Kong and more.

Sansan was launched back in June 2007, and subsequently started providing the Sansan CRM service (previously known as Link Knowledge) for companies in Japan in September 2007. While they spent six and half years to acquire 2,000 business users in Japan, they could acquire as many as 300 companies during the last two months in the US and Singapore, so this rapid user growth may indicate that there is an even huger potential for their business outside the Japanese market.

In addition to the premium Sansan service for business, the company has been also providing freemium service Eight for individual users.

Our readers may recall that Sansan fundraised 1.46 billion yen (about $14.6 million) from Nikkei Digital Media, Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), Energy & Environment Investment, and GMO Venture Partners back in May. The company recently won an award for their brand new office with a great view from Japanese news company Nikkei and New Office Promotion Association.