Tokyo-based Infinity Venture Partners (IVP), the seed round investor focused on tech startups in Japan and China, and known as the host of Japanese semi-annual startup showcase event Infinity Venture Summit, announced today that it has formed its third fund called Infinity e.ventures Asia III, L.P.
The new fund has raised $32 million from corporate and individual investors in Japan alone, but the amount is expected to reach $100 million next year with additional funding from foreign investors who have participated in their past funds. According to IVP, investors in the third fund include Recruit Holdings, Daiwa Securities, Sammy Networks (game developer), Orso (mobile developer), Mixi, and United.
Since its launch in January 2009, IVP has invested $128 million in over 40 tech startups in Japan and China, including Groupon Japan, Smart Education, Freee (cloud-based accounting platform in Japan), Yeahka (the Chinese equivalent to the Square payments platform), and 36kr (startup database platformer in China). In addition, the group has also invested in international tech companies like AppAnnie (app store analytics) and The RealReal Japan (luxury consignment) in partnership with e.ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm.
IVP launched a co-working and incubation space called TechTemple in Beijing last year to nurture Chinese startups and their ecosystem in the world’s second largest startup community.
See the original story in Japanese. Backpacking is fun. We sometimes experience unexpected troubles during a trip, such as finding no public transport introduced on a guidebook or facing the fact that a town on a traveler’s map has vanished. But travel can turn them into a joy. I often visit many startup communities around the world, and that may be due to such a mindset of a backpacker. A curated information portal site focused on local festivities was recently launched in Bangkok, one of the world’s top backpacker hubs. The website is called Event Carnival and was developed by former Social Recruiting COO Kota Saito and prominent Japanese globetrotter Hiroki Takagi. In fall of 2013, the duo promised each other in Tokyo that they would meet together in Thailand six months later. Saito went to India to help set up an English conversation school, and Takagi left Japan to polish his programming skills. Six months later in April this year, they met in Bangkok and participated in Songkran, the local traditional festival where people throw water on each others to celebrate. The duo counts many travel aficionados among their friends, and they have always been hearing of complaints like: Participating in a local festival maximizes the attraction of a travel destination where it’s happening. But nobody in advance knows when and…
Backpacking is fun. We sometimes experience unexpected troubles during a trip, such as finding no public transport introduced on a guidebook or facing the fact that a town on a traveler’s map has vanished. But travel can turn them into a joy. I often visit many startup communities around the world, and that may be due to such a mindset of a backpacker.
A curated information portal site focused on local festivities was recently launched in Bangkok, one of the world’s top backpacker hubs. The website is called Event Carnival and was developed by former Social Recruiting COO Kota Saito and prominent Japanese globetrotter Hiroki Takagi.
In fall of 2013, the duo promised each other in Tokyo that they would meet together in Thailand six months later. Saito went to India to help set up an English conversation school, and Takagi left Japan to polish his programming skills. Six months later in April this year, they met in Bangkok and participated in Songkran, the local traditional festival where people throw water on each others to celebrate. The duo counts many travel aficionados among their friends, and they have always been hearing of complaints like:
Participating in a local festival maximizes the attraction of a travel destination where it’s happening. But nobody in advance knows when and where to visit in order to join local festivals they may like.
Despite the fact that there are many guidebooks about sightseeing spots around the world, I have had no chance to find a one-stop information resource that presents how, when and where to join local festivals to be found worldwide. For this exact reason the duo launched the festival-focused portal site. Carnival, the company behind the portal, fundraised an undisclosed sum in a seed round from Tokyo-based East Ventures in July.
As of today, most of the content on the website adopts images or videos provided by third parties under the Creative Commons license. However, the Event Carnival team will visit and cover as many festivals as possible by themselves; it will replace the content with their own article as it becomes available. While the website has an English interface, articles showing on up festivals are mainly comprised of images or videos rather than text, which makes it easier to ask their friend backpackers to contribute to the website without concerns about language barriers.
The Event Carnival team is currently managing a share house called Startup House in central Bangkok. They haven’t mobilized any massive promotional campaign for the service yet, but guests staying there have been spreading the word and helped the team a lot to build a solid user base. The team is currently focused on increasing content but not quite in a phase to consider massive monetization. Since these users are staying under the same roof with the team, it’s easy both to carry out user validation and to fathom user needs.
The Event Carnival team is planning to start developing an Android mobile app first because they have chosen Southeast Asia as their main battlefield. In the future, they think that they will provide users with solutions meeting needs around festival participation, almost like what Meetup.com or Couch Surfing are providing as an ‘Event’ menu. Saito elaborated:
When you go on a trip, you should participate in local festivities at your destination. That’s our message. If you participate, your trip experience will be changed permanently and likely to stay in your heart forever. There are many Gullivers in the hotel or flight booking industry. But I think there’s no Gulliver delivering better travel experience as well. We aim to become the top player in this space.
Many of our readers may think that Japanese startups like Trippiece or Voyagin can be competitors for Carnival; however, each company provides different user experiences. Carnival looks to differentiate themselves from others by focusing on festival matters rather than an entire travel experience, in addition to targeting backpackers not only in Asia but also around the planet as potential users. It will indeed be intriguing to see how they fare with this strategy in such a competitive sector.
See the original story in Japanese. UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) announced on Tuesday that it has launched a competition called Japan-UK Tech Awards to bring promising Japanese startups to the UK. The competition is in partnership with NTT Docomo Ventures and Deloitte’s Tohmatsu Venture Support. The competition is for Japanese startups that want to expand into the UK and other European countries. Applicant startups must: Have been running their business in Tokyo for three years or more. Have four or more employees. Have a service or product that they can market. Submit an application and a three to five page plan on how they will market their product or service in the UK. Applications will be screened by five judges from Japan and the UK, and UKTI will announce the finalists in December. The following awards will be given out: Complimentary accommodation for five nights in London and complimentary flights by British Airways (scheduled in March 2015). Lunch with Tim Hitchens, the UK ambassador to Japan. Complimentary one-month membership to London-based incubator The Bakery Lord Livingston, the minister of UKTI, visited Tokyo last week to announce the competition. At a news conference, he said that the UK’s ratio of…
The competition is for Japanese startups that want to expand into the UK and other European countries.
Applicant startups must:
Have been running their business in Tokyo for three years or more.
Have four or more employees.
Have a service or product that they can market.
Submit an application and a three to five page plan on how they will market their product or service in the UK.
Applications will be screened by five judges from Japan and the UK, and UKTI will announce the finalists in December. The following awards will be given out:
Complimentary accommodation for five nights in London and complimentary flights by British Airways (scheduled in March 2015).
Lunch with Tim Hitchens, the UK ambassador to Japan.
Complimentary one-month membership to London-based incubator The Bakery
Lord Livingston, the minister of UKTI, visited Tokyo last week to announce the competition. At a news conference, he said that the UK’s ratio of the Internet economy to GDP is the highest in the world and people in the UK commonly use e-commerce sites to do their shopping. He invited Japanese startups to be a part of TechCity, a startup community in London.
Nobuyuki Akimoto, vice president of NTT Docomo Ventures, said they began investing in the UK in October 2013, by investing in CertiVox, a startup based in London that has been developing a password-less authentication system. He expects Japanese startups to leverage this opportunity to find a path to global markets rather than through Silicon Valley.
The application deadline is 10 December. Visit their website for more details.
See the original story in Japanese. Here is good news for entrepreneurs aiming to develop hardware. Japanese internet company DMM.com launched a hardware incubation space called DMM.make Akiba in Akihabara on Friday [1]. The facility will open on 11 November, and has started receiving membership applications. DMM.make Akiba offers members a facility valued at $4.5 million comprising 150 machines for hardware production, such as 3D printers, testing devices for acquiring public certification for electric appliances, and platforms for mass production. In addition to providing office and event space, members can use the address of the facility to register their company. Tokyo-based hardware startup Cerevo and hardware-focused startup incubator ABBALab will move to the lab and help DMM operate it. The facility has three floors (see pictures above, click to enlarge); the Studio floor provides environmental testing and mass-production prototyping for hardware development, the Base floor has a shared office and event space, and the Hub floor provides consulting services on hardware development and sells electronic parts. (See this PDF file for a list of the facility’s equipment.) The process for hardware developments needs to cover a lot of ground, from prototyping, acquiring certification, tests to improve the quality, and operational knowledge…
Here is good news for entrepreneurs aiming to develop hardware.
Japanese internet company DMM.com launched a hardware incubation space called DMM.make Akiba in Akihabara on Friday [1]. The facility will open on 11 November, and has started receiving membership applications.
DMM.make Akiba offers members a facility valued at $4.5 million comprising 150 machines for hardware production, such as 3D printers, testing devices for acquiring public certification for electric appliances, and platforms for mass production. In addition to providing office and event space, members can use the address of the facility to register their company. Tokyo-based hardware startup Cerevo and hardware-focused startup incubator ABBALab will move to the lab and help DMM operate it.
The facility has three floors (see pictures above, click to enlarge); the Studio floor provides environmental testing and mass-production prototyping for hardware development, the Base floor has a shared office and event space, and the Hub floor provides consulting services on hardware development and sells electronic parts. (See this PDF file for a list of the facility’s equipment.)
The process for hardware developments needs to cover a lot of ground, from prototyping, acquiring certification, tests to improve the quality, and operational knowledge for mass production. But equipments or experts for hardware developments are fragmented, which had been preventing startups from launching their hardware products unless they are a large manufacturer. In our recent interview with ABBALab CEO Osamu Ogasahara who has produced this facility, he explained that this is the place where entrepreneurs can create something like Softbank’s humanoid robot Pepper.
Cerevo supervises the project
Cerevo, the Japanese startup best known for its Cerevo Cam and IoT crowdfunding site Cerevo Dash, is also behind this project.
The company invited ABBALab’s Ogasahara to their board and started preparing a $20 million investment fund. Since its launch in 2007, Cerevo has been behind up-and-coming popular “connected” hardware products, though not all of them have been introduced under their name. Regarding these OEM products developed by Cerevo, few details are available due to their non-disclosure agreements with clients. However, users can learn a lot from what Cerevo has said about the new facility.
ABBALab is a hardware-focused startup incubation program launched by Movida Japan CEO Taizo Son and Ogasahara. Coinciding with the launch of DMM.make Akiba, ABBALab started receiving applications for the next batch of the incubation program. The program consists of two key initiatives; “Scholarship” to support entrepreneurs sell the products and “Fellow” that helps entrepreneurs conduct hardware R&D.
The Fellow initiative is unique in that it will ask the Scholarship participating startups to provide their engineering skills and resources to Fellow participating startups, and the former can receive funds from ABBALab in return for rendering their services. Participating supporters include Yoshihiro Kawahara (technical advisor for inkjet-printed circuit board startup AgIC), engineering company Progress Technologies, and Incubate Fund partner Masahiko Honma, and several VC firms.
To take part in the program, a team must pass a screening process. The Bridge will provide more details on the program soon.
Disclosure: The Bridge has a business partnership with Nomad, the company that Ogasahara has managed. We are providing selected articles to DMM.make, a news curation site by Japanese internet company DMM. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. T-media Holdings, the internet business-focused intermediate stock holding company of Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator Culture Convenience Club (CCC for short, TSE:4756), held a briefing with their subsidiaries IMJ and IMJ Investment Partners on Friday. CCC is Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator. The internet business-focused company group announced that it has launched a startup support program called T-Venture Program. Under this program, every participating startup can integrate T-site user accounts and fundraise up to 100 million yen ($894,000) from IMJ Investment Partners when necessary. Making full use of the strength of their assets, such as a database of 50 million members of CCC’s cross-industry loyalty program, a database of films and music titles available in Japan, as well as their rewards point system, T-media Holdings wants to help startups market their apps or web services by driving user traffic and cross marketing between T-media holdings’ media portal T-site and its affiliated web services. T-Media Holdings will give these startups the convenience of testing integration with the T-site platform in advance, which the company thinks will differentiate them from similar incubators. On a related note, they will release a T-site mobile app in early November….
T-media Holdings, the internet business-focused intermediate stock holding company of Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator Culture Convenience Club (CCC for short, TSE:4756), held a briefing with their subsidiaries IMJ and IMJ Investment Partners on Friday. CCC is Japan’s largest bookstore chain operator.
The internet business-focused company group announced that it has launched a startup support program called T-Venture Program. Under this program, every participating startup can integrate T-site user accounts and fundraise up to 100 million yen ($894,000) from IMJ Investment Partners when necessary.
Making full use of the strength of their assets, such as a database of 50 million members of CCC’s cross-industry loyalty program, a database of films and music titles available in Japan, as well as their rewards point system, T-media Holdings wants to help startups market their apps or web services by driving user traffic and cross marketing between T-media holdings’ media portal T-site and its affiliated web services.
T-Media Holdings will give these startups the convenience of testing integration with the T-site platform in advance, which the company thinks will differentiate them from similar incubators. On a related note, they will release a T-site mobile app in early November.
Through this program, T-media Holdings aims to invite web services other than what the company provides, such as services for pets, cooking, health and beauty, cameras, kids, and bicycles. It will add them into their service line-ups for consumers in partnership with participating startups. Applicant startups must be younger than five years, but not only consumer-focused services but also tools or technology-oriented projects are welcomed.
To take part submit an application via this form by November 28. About 40 teams will be selected in the first screening, which will be narrowed to 10 finalists during the second screening process based on a face-to-face interview. Finalists will be presented at an event to be held on 20 January 2015 at Shibuya Hikarie, Tokyo. CCC founder and CEO Muneaki Masuda will take part.
In November, T-media Holdings plans to hold briefing events in Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka. If you reside outside Tokyo but are interested in participating in the program, check out these opportunities.
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Metaps, the company that provides an app monetization platform using artificial intelligence, announced today that it has teamed up with Space Shift to start a joint study on big data analytic systems in relation to ultra-micro satellites. Both companies aim to develop life supporting services based on the joint study’s results. Space Shift develops space ventures via micro satellites, and CEO Naruo Kanemoto is serving Silicon Valley-based space funeral startup Elysium Space’s business development. Topical issues in the big data business sector include Google’s acquisition of Nest, which will collect household temperature variation data via a smart thermostat device. Google also acquired satellite startup Skybox Imaging in June. One investor told The Bridge that he is interested in the sector because satellites have been miniaturized and simplified to the point that even startups can get involved in satellite development. The space funeral service that Metaps will provide with Space Shift will employ a satellite weighing less than 100 kilograms (220 lb.). What will happen with this initiative? Regarding the Nest acquisition, it can be adopted into an energy related business if it can predict fuel consumption based on…
This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.
Tokyo-based Metaps, the company that provides an app monetization platform using artificial intelligence, announced today that it has teamed up with Space Shift to start a joint study on big data analytic systems in relation to ultra-micro satellites. Both companies aim to develop life supporting services based on the joint study’s results.
Space Shift develops space ventures via micro satellites, and CEO Naruo Kanemoto is serving Silicon Valley-based space funeral startup Elysium Space’s business development.
Topical issues in the big data business sector include Google’s acquisition of Nest, which will collect household temperature variation data via a smart thermostat device. Google also acquired satellite startup Skybox Imaging in June.
One investor told The Bridge that he is interested in the sector because satellites have been miniaturized and simplified to the point that even startups can get involved in satellite development. The space funeral service that Metaps will provide with Space Shift will employ a satellite weighing less than 100 kilograms (220 lb.).
What will happen with this initiative? Regarding the Nest acquisition, it can be adopted into an energy related business if it can predict fuel consumption based on the collected temperature variation data. Smart cars being developed by Tesla or Google will also provide big data for transport, which will make it possible to foresee traffic jams or provide car owners with expendable supplies on time when needed. Micro satellites will allow the collection of a wide range of data, but the impact this will have on our lives is hard to imagine.
Metaps CEO Katsuaki Sato explained his business outlook:
Having bought out an app store survey and analytics company, we realized that there are some interesting tendencies in the global app store ranking. One is every market has a regularity, and the other thing is we can find a correlation between the app store ranking and various events such as share price variation. So we think that the future can be predictable if we can grab the aforementioned tendencies.
We think that this methodology can be adapted to various things in the world as well as app store ranking. The space industry has not adopted IT solutions so much but can cover many variations in a wider range than any other industry. “Considering our planet as a single market” is our company policy. Based on that, I thought we will start a space venture sooner or later, and we decided to partner with Space Shift as a first step.
We will feature Metaps again when more information become available.