news

Preparing for an IPO, Japan’s business chat tool provider Chatwork raises $2.5 million

Junya Mori 2015.04.27

ryu-muramatsu-toshiyuki-yamamoto — From the left: GMO Venture Partners’ founding partner Ryu Muramatsu, Chatwork CEO Toshiyuki Yamamoto

See the original story in Japanese.

Osaka-based Chatwork, a Japanese startup that operates a cloud-based chat tool for business under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised 300 million yen ($2.5 million) from GMO Venture Partners. The funds will be used to hire engineers to strengthen system development, promotional efforts for user acquisitions, and partnering with other companies.

Chatwork will greatly expand business in Asia, leveraging GMO Venture Partners’ massive links with startup ecosystems and payment networks in the region. Headquartered in Osaka, Chatwork has regional offices in Tokyo and Silicon Valley. The company is a 35-person team, but will grow to over 100 people within a few years.

Chatwork plans to release the tool’s version 4.0 in this year, rolling out a fully-renewed interface of the mobile app, strengthening task management and video conference functions, developing a desktop app, and officially launching an application programming interface (API).

Since its launch in 2000, Chatwork has been bootstrapping the business in positive balance. With the funding, the company will focus on strengthening its business structure and product development. The company is today preparing for an IPO.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson and “Tex” Pomeroy

news

‘D Free’ bowel movement notifier from Japan secures funding; launches crowdfunding campaign

Masaru Ikeda 2015.04.26

See the original story in Japanese. Triple W Japan, the startup behind a wearable device that predicts the timing of bowel movements, announced on Friday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from Nissay Capital and iStyle Capital. Nissay Capital is the investment arm of a Japan’s leading insurance company while iStyle Capital is that of the company behind Japan’s largest online cosmetics review site. The device, D Free, is derived from the phrase ‘diaper free.’ Using ultrasonic waves it estimates how much time a person has until the feces will stimulate the sacral bone, which triggers the urge to defecate. In this way, users will not have to rush to the bathroom, and it will free them from worries about the risk of incontinence. It will help non-handicapped persons, as well as Parkinson’s sufferers, the physically challenged, and the elderly, who might be have to wear a diaper regain their dignity. Triple W Japan CEO Atsushi Nakanishi started developing D Free because he realized that the state of feces and the bowel condition can be monitored from outside the body using the same technology that fetal ultrasound scans use. The D Free device monitors the speed of feces growing…

See the original story in Japanese.

Triple W Japan, the startup behind a wearable device that predicts the timing of bowel movements, announced on Friday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from Nissay Capital and iStyle Capital. Nissay Capital is the investment arm of a Japan’s leading insurance company while iStyle Capital is that of the company behind Japan’s largest online cosmetics review site.

The device, D Free, is derived from the phrase ‘diaper free.’ Using ultrasonic waves it estimates how much time a person has until the feces will stimulate the sacral bone, which triggers the urge to defecate. In this way, users will not have to rush to the bathroom, and it will free them from worries about the risk of incontinence. It will help non-handicapped persons, as well as Parkinson’s sufferers, the physically challenged, and the elderly, who might be have to wear a diaper regain their dignity.

Triple W Japan CEO Atsushi Nakanishi started developing D Free because he realized that the state of feces and the bowel condition can be monitored from outside the body using the same technology that fetal ultrasound scans use.

The D Free device monitors the speed of feces growing and estimates the time to defecation. When using the device for the first time, users will be requested to enter their BMI (body mass index) via the app for grabbing their skinfold thickness, while the device will learn personal equation more precisely as users keep using it longer. Towards the start of shipping in April 2016, the team will improve the prediction algorithm, mountability, and wearing touch so please remind that some technical specifications are subject to change.

In addition, the Triple W Japan team launched a funding campaign on Japanese crowdfunding site Ready for D Free. The project raised over 10% of its initial goal of 12 million yen ($100,000) on the first day of the 90-day the crowdfunding campaign.

Nakanishi elaborated:

Many people want to monitor how much food or liquids they have consumed using various devices or apps but not for how much they have excreted. To stay healthy requires managing what to eat, how much to exercise, and mental balance.

By matching data of how much they have eaten and that of how much they have excreted, the context coming out of that will advise them to take some rest or drink some water when needed to improve their condition.

In addition, colorectal cancer is the leading cause of women’s death. I think the app can help prevent the disease as well as allow insurance companies to collect precise data in order to measure the risk of the disease, improving the fair value of their insurance contracts.

Triple W Japan is a 20-person team including four core members, designers, and clinical testers. Based in Japan and the US, they have a good reputation globally and were covered by foreign news media.

A survey reports that 48% of Japanese women are suffering from constipation. We sometimes read news articles saying that train drivers and conductors cannot seem to go to the bathroom when they are on duty but have a sudden bowel movement. Since science is well developed today, it’s probably we can expect science to help solving these bowel issues. Other interesting ideas include integrating the device with a public toilet finder app or AirPnP.

The team won the Tokyo preliminary for the Pioneers Festival conference last month, and they will appear at Pioneers’ pitch competition finals in May in Vienna, Austria.

Edited by Kurt Hanson

news

Taiwan’s VMFive wins Slush Asia’s pitching competition in Tokyo with app ad platform

Shintaro Eguchi 2015.04.25

See the original story in Japanese. Slush Asia, the first Asian edition of the Finnish tech conference, was held in Tokyo on Friday, attracting 3,000 attendees from around the world. Accompanied by a number of keynote presentations by speakers and demo booth exhibitions by startups, some 50 teams from Japan and the rest of the world presented their pitches in a huge dome tent venue called The White Rock. See also: Finland’s startup conference Slush announces its first Asian edition in Tokyo Ten startups competed in each of five categories; cloud and marketplace, entertainment, education, tool, and hi-tech and hardware. The five teams selected out of 50 applicants were AlpacaDB, VMFive, Bento Bioworks, Fastmedia, and Fove. Taiwan startup VMFive won the first Slush Asia Pitching Competition. Slush Asia Pitching Competition Winner Entertainment category finalist: VMFive (Taiwan) VMFive provides a virtual environment solution for mobile apps. Their solution AdPlay lets users demo an app before purchasing it with no pre-installed software or SDKs from developers. The company partnered with Japan’s Adways and started a service that lets users demo an app before its launch on Adway’s Yoyaku Top 10 solution (also known in English as PreLaunch Party). They also recently partnered…

See the original story in Japanese.

Slush Asia, the first Asian edition of the Finnish tech conference, was held in Tokyo on Friday, attracting 3,000 attendees from around the world.

Accompanied by a number of keynote presentations by speakers and demo booth exhibitions by startups, some 50 teams from Japan and the rest of the world presented their pitches in a huge dome tent venue called The White Rock.

See also:

Finland’s startup conference Slush announces its first Asian edition in Tokyo

Ten startups competed in each of five categories; cloud and marketplace, entertainment, education, tool, and hi-tech and hardware. The five teams selected out of 50 applicants were AlpacaDB, VMFive, Bento Bioworks, Fastmedia, and Fove.

Taiwan startup VMFive won the first Slush Asia Pitching Competition.

Slush Asia Pitching Competition Winner
Entertainment category finalist: VMFive (Taiwan)

VMFive provides a virtual environment solution for mobile apps. Their solution AdPlay lets users demo an app before purchasing it with no pre-installed software or SDKs from developers.

The company partnered with Japan’s Adways and started a service that lets users demo an app before its launch on Adway’s Yoyaku Top 10 solution (also known in English as PreLaunch Party). They also recently partnered with Japanese digital ad agency D2C to accelerate efforts to partner with ad networks and app introduction sites.

They mainly target game publishers, generating revenue on a cost-per-trial basis. According to VMFive founder Jessie Wu, the mobile game app market in Russia is 2.5 times larger than that of the US, where the company’s solution delivers two to five times better performance to game developers compared to conventional banner ads or video ads. VMFive has three clients, offering them the service for less than a few US dollars per API (application programming interface) call.

See also:

Taiwan’s iChef wins pitch competition at Global Brain Alliance Forum in Tokyo

Cloud & Marketplace category finalist: AlpacaDB (USA)

Based in San Mateo, California, AlpacaDB provides a deep learning platform that allows systems to associate tags with or sort non-structural data, such as images leveraging image analyzing technology.

The company serves more than 10 companies including e-commerce platforms and stock photo providers. When users label their photos via the online dashboard, the platform will learn their actions and generate an algorithm to automatically sort photos. The service is free, but a fee will be charged when using based on the algorithm generated.

Education category finalist: Bento Works (UK)

Based in London, Bento Bioworks develops a hardware for biotechnology experiments for individuals. For example, the device allows you to find out what animal’s meat and ingredients are used in a hamburger by analyzing DNA sequence.

The company, founded just a few months ago, is targeting university students majoring in biology.

Tool category finalist: Fastmedia (Japan)

Fastmedia has developed a platform called Yappli that allows users to develop a mobile app via drag-and-drop operations. No need to code, but it is available for developing apps for cross-platform such as iOS and Android. SME users are charged $100 a month, while enterprise users pay $1,000.

Seeing 70% QoQ sales growth, the platform is being used in enterprise offices, non-profit organizations, TEDx events, and other citizens’ projects.

Hi-tech & Hardware category: Fove (Japan)

Tokyo-based Fove is developing a consumer-oriented head-mounted display (HMD) under the same name.

Their product allows users to control with their eyes a 360-degree virtual world using a leading-edge display, eye tracking, orientation sensing and head position tracking via integration of a high refresh rate gyro, accelerometer, and magnetometer sensors.

By detecting a 3D position which a user is looking at, the product will draw a more unblurred image around the position, giving the one a natural and immersive feeling even in the virtual reality space. It also enables users to enter characters via eye-tracking.

The company is expanding to the medical industry to help the physically challenged enter characters, or operate real objects in combination with other IoT (internet of things) devices.

See also:

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson

news

e27 holds Japan Qualifiers for Echelon 2015 Top 100 startup competition in Tokyo

Masaru Ikeda 2015.04.23

See the original story in Japanese. Asia’s regional startup news media e27 will hold its annual conference Echelon 2015 this June in Singapore. Towards a startup competition at the conference, the media company held Echelon Top 100 Japan Qualifiers at NTT Docomo Ventures in Tokyo on Tuesday to choose delegates from Japan. Wovn.io won the Judge’s Choice award while the People’s Choice award was given to SynchroLife. Wovn.io allows website owners to translate their websites into multiple languages simply by adding a one-line JavaScript code to their HTML files. Since launch in June 2014, they have translated more than 120,000 pages. Website owners can choose from two types of translation – machine translation using Google Translate and human-powered crowdsourced translation using Gengo. See also: Japan’s WOVN.io unveils premium plans, offers multilingual support for enterprise websites SynchroLife is a mobile app for foodies, allowing users to follow other like-minded foodies or patronized restaurants by continuously making check-ins and ranks for restaurants visited. It is now available in Japanese for use in Japan, but the team is working on a multilingual version for expansion in the Asian region where locals are likely to post food photos and be eager to find good restaurants in the neighborhood. In addition to Japan, e27 is hosting local Echelon qualifiers events in Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India,…

See the original story in Japanese.

Asia’s regional startup news media e27 will hold its annual conference Echelon 2015 this June in Singapore. Towards a startup competition at the conference, the media company held Echelon Top 100 Japan Qualifiers at NTT Docomo Ventures in Tokyo on Tuesday to choose delegates from Japan. Wovn.io won the Judge’s Choice award while the People’s Choice award was given to SynchroLife.

echelon2015-japan-qualifiers-judge-choice — Wovn.io co-founder Jeff Sandford (left) receives the Judge’s Choice award from Global Brain partner Nobutake Suzuki

Wovn.io allows website owners to translate their websites into multiple languages simply by adding a one-line JavaScript code to their HTML files. Since launch in June 2014, they have translated more than 120,000 pages. Website owners can choose from two types of translation – machine translation using Google Translate and human-powered crowdsourced translation using Gengo.

See also:

Japan’s WOVN.io unveils premium plans, offers multilingual support for enterprise websites

SynchroLife is a mobile app for foodies, allowing users to follow other like-minded foodies or patronized restaurants by continuously making check-ins and ranks for restaurants visited. It is now available in Japanese for use in Japan, but the team is working on a multilingual version for expansion in the Asian region where locals are likely to post food photos and be eager to find good restaurants in the neighborhood.

In addition to Japan, e27 is hosting local Echelon qualifiers events in Australia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Echelon Asia Summit 2015, the main event with the competition finals, is scheduled to take place in Singapore on 23rd and 24th June, where delegates from every participant country will come together and compete with each others to win the top honor.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japan’s leisure booking site Asoview secures $5 million from travel giant JTB Group, others

Junya Mori 2015.04.22

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese. Tokyo-based Asoview (previously known as Catarizm), the company behind an online leisure booking site under the same, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese travel agent company JTB Group. Upon this announcement, Asoview also announced it has secured 600 million yen ($5 million) funding in the round led by JTB Group with participation from YJ Capital, Jafco, and Globis Capital Partners. Asoview and JTB Group will join forces in online sales, running promotional campaigns to motivate more foreigners to visit Japan towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, as well as developing additional services such as benefit packages for businesses. Asoview was incorporated in March 2011. Since the launch of the service back in July 2012, Asoview has been providing 6,000 excursion programs in 300 genres in partnership with more than 2,000 companies nationwide in Japan. The company previously fundraised about 200 million yen (about $1.7 million) from Global Capital Partners and Jafco in March 2014. See also: Asoview partners with Yahoo Japan, proposes more weekend leisure options CNet Japan Startup Award nominees: Travel startups Asoview and Trippiece Translated by Masaru Ikeda

tomohisa-yamano-hiroki-furuno — From the left: Asoview CEO Tomohisa Yamano, JTB Group vice president Hiroki Furuno

This is the abridged version of our original article in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Asoview (previously known as Catarizm), the company behind an online leisure booking site under the same, announced today that it has partnered with Japanese travel agent company JTB Group. Upon this announcement, Asoview also announced it has secured 600 million yen ($5 million) funding in the round led by JTB Group with participation from YJ Capital, Jafco, and Globis Capital Partners.

Asoview and JTB Group will join forces in online sales, running promotional campaigns to motivate more foreigners to visit Japan towards the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, as well as developing additional services such as benefit packages for businesses.

Asoview was incorporated in March 2011. Since the launch of the service back in July 2012, Asoview has been providing 6,000 excursion programs in 300 genres in partnership with more than 2,000 companies nationwide in Japan. The company previously fundraised about 200 million yen (about $1.7 million) from Global Capital Partners and Jafco in March 2014.

See also:

Translated by Masaru Ikeda

news

Japanese scheduling and appointment booking solution Coubic raises $2.6 million

Masaru Ikeda 2015.04.22

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Coubic, the Japanese startup best known for its scheduling and appointment booking solution under the same name as well as last-minute beauty salon booking app Popcorn, announced today that it has fundraised 310 million yen (about $2.6 million) from DCM and Gree Ventures. Upon the funding, former Goldman Sachs vice president Yuki Maniwa and DCM’s general partner Osuke Honda joined the management board, aiming to strengthen Coubic’s management setup and corporate governance. This funding follows their previous round securing about $500,000 almost a year ago from DCM and Gree Ventures, the same investors at this funding round. Since its launch in April last year, Coubic has acquired over 10,000 merchants using the booking solution. They will use the funds to develop additional functions like customer relation management. Maniwa was a classmate for Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka when attending his university. Kuraoka told The Bridge that he expects Maniwa’s business skills and vitality with the proven background.

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Coubic, the Japanese startup best known for its scheduling and appointment booking solution under the same name as well as last-minute beauty salon booking app Popcorn, announced today that it has fundraised 310 million yen (about $2.6 million) from DCM and Gree Ventures. Upon the funding, former Goldman Sachs vice president Yuki Maniwa and DCM’s general partner Osuke Honda joined the management board, aiming to strengthen Coubic’s management setup and corporate governance.

This funding follows their previous round securing about $500,000 almost a year ago from DCM and Gree Ventures, the same investors at this funding round. Since its launch in April last year, Coubic has acquired over 10,000 merchants using the booking solution. They will use the funds to develop additional functions like customer relation management.

Maniwa was a classmate for Coubic CEO Hiroshi Kuraoka when attending his university. Kuraoka told The Bridge that he expects Maniwa’s business skills and vitality with the proven background.

Preparing for an IPO, Japan’s business chat tool provider Chatwork raises $2.5 million

Recent Articles

Trends

‘D Free’ bowel movement notifier from Japan secures funding; launches crowdfunding campaign

Taiwan’s VMFive wins Slush Asia’s pitching competition in Tokyo with app ad platform

Slush Asia Pitching Competition Winner
Entertainment category finalist: VMFive (Taiwan)

Cloud & Marketplace category finalist: AlpacaDB (USA)

Education category finalist: Bento Works (UK)

Tool category finalist: Fastmedia (Japan)

Hi-tech & Hardware category: Fove (Japan)

e27 holds Japan Qualifiers for Echelon 2015 Top 100 startup competition in Tokyo

Japan’s leisure booking site Asoview secures $5 million from travel giant JTB Group, others

Japanese scheduling and appointment booking solution Coubic raises $2.6 million

Related news

Recent Articles

Trends

Related news

Slush Asia Pitching Competition Winner Entertainment category finalist: VMFive (Taiwan)

Cloud & Marketplace category finalist: AlpacaDB (USA)

Education category finalist: Bento Works (UK)

Tool category finalist: Fastmedia (Japan)

Hi-tech & Hardware category: Fove (Japan)

Related news

Related news

Related news

Slush Asia Pitching Competition Winner
Entertainment category finalist: VMFive (Taiwan)