Tokyo- and Tel Aviv-based startup accelerator Samurai Incubate announced last week that they have begun recruiting Japanese companies to participate in the Accelerate Program Israel, their goal being to accelerate M&A as well as R&D of the latest technology in the region by fostering Israeli startups.
Accelerate Program Israel will be a three-month program run on the basis of Samurai Incubate’s wealth of experience in the incubation of startups in both Japan and Israel. The company says that they will be able to make use of their co-working space in Tel Aviv, Samurai House in Israel, as well as the large social network they have built in the country.
In July 2014, Samurai Incubate expanded into Israel, establishing their incubation office Samurai House in the city of Tel Aviv. In January of this year they established a new fund called the Samurai Incubate Fund No.5 and has been investing in Israeli pre-seed round startups. Additionally, the company invested in Tel Aviv-based startup incubator Startup East in May, and has been strengthening exchange between the Japanese and Israeli startup communities and cooperation between the two ecosystems.
Samurai Incubate director Shouta Morozumi says that compared to China and Korea, Japan’s business presence in Israel is relatively small.
Acquisition cases of Israeli startups by Chinese businesses such as Alibaba are increasing, and Samsung is now launching an accelerator program in Israel called Runway, so compared to those kinds of developments the movement of Japanese business is quite small as of now.
In Japan there are precedents of incubation programs such as IBM BlueHub which is carried out together with IBM Japan, but the company is hoping they’ll be able to elect five or so startups with a similar framework and successfully hold a three-month accelerator program in Israel.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Slogan is expanding its “growth human capital” business. The company recently tied up with Singapore-based Coent Venture Partners and has started co-investing in startups in Southeast Asia. While Slogan has been involved with the EdTech-focused acceleration program Slogan Viling Ventures as a partner, the company began investing on the partnership for the first time. Coent Venture Partners is an investment fund led by Rearpa CEO Shuhei Morofuji who founded Tokyo-based medical human resources company SMS and is representing Viling Holdings, the administrator of Slogan Viling Ventures. Former Enigmo and Groupon Japan CFO Takeo Matsuda is also serving Coent Venture Partners as CFO. Accelerating seed investment in startups Slogan Coent, the investment fund jointly managed by Slogan and Coent Venture Partners, is valued at 160 million yen ($1.3 million), expecting to invest several million to 15 million yen in each of the seed-stage startups. The fund is not so large, but they are focused on human resource-related businesses. Slogan CEO Yutaka Ito explained: What makes us outstanding is our team. We can help startups expand their business in Southeast Asia leveraging the partnership with Singapore-based Coent Venture Partners. In addition, we have freelance engineers…
From right to left: Slogan CEO Yutaka Ito, Growth Capital Division manager Hidemaro Maekawa
Tokyo-based Slogan is expanding its “growth human capital” business. The company recently tied up with Singapore-based Coent Venture Partners and has started co-investing in startups in Southeast Asia.
While Slogan has been involved with the EdTech-focused acceleration program Slogan Viling Ventures as a partner, the company began investing on the partnership for the first time.
Coent Venture Partners is an investment fund led by Rearpa CEO Shuhei Morofuji who founded Tokyo-based medical human resources company SMS and is representing Viling Holdings, the administrator of Slogan Viling Ventures. Former Enigmo and Groupon Japan CFO Takeo Matsuda is also serving Coent Venture Partners as CFO.
Accelerating seed investment in startups
Slogan Coent, the investment fund jointly managed by Slogan and Coent Venture Partners, is valued at 160 million yen ($1.3 million), expecting to invest several million to 15 million yen in each of the seed-stage startups. The fund is not so large, but they are focused on human resource-related businesses.
Slogan CEO Yutaka Ito explained:
What makes us outstanding is our team. We can help startups expand their business in Southeast Asia leveraging the partnership with Singapore-based Coent Venture Partners. In addition, we have freelance engineers on our team as technical advisors who have developed a number of services at startups from scratch. Based on these strengths, we are going to invest in startups using an angel investment approach.
Budding startups are typically short of resources, but we often hear that they especially lack engineers. Slogan Coent makes seed investments in these startups in conjunction with offering engineering resources, helping them design services in a launching phase.
This will benefit the entrepreneur side. Tokyo-based Bally’s, the startup behind an online travel magazine for females called Tabi Muse, fundraised from Slogan Coent because the startup lacked engineers as well as capital funds.
Slogan’s Growth Capital Division manager Hidemaro Maekawa explained:
The Slogan Coent fund has invested in two startups. We are planning to invest in three startups in June, while another three or four startups are under review for investment.
Slogan has excellent human resources since they have been operating as a human capital business. It hasn’t been released publicly, but supposedly highly capable students who came to Slogan now work for the startups Slogan invested in as interns. Slogan can introduce excellent human resources as well as provide skilled engineers, which is their big strength.
Supporting entrepreneurs creating new verticals
How are investment decisions made at the Slogan Coent fund? Ito explained:
Whether or not we invest in a startup depends on whether Slogan can get involved in and take a hands-on approach to their business as well as whether talented human resources can influence the growth of their business. We especially like to support startups that can leverage our connection with Asia and the strength that we have in the human capital business.
The business plan of regional expansion to Asia is not mandatory in getting funds. But if your business has this possibility, you will be able to fundraise hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fund. Ito and Maekawa said they have no limit in the vertical or geographical areas of businesses that they will invest in.
They supposedly do not judge whether it is possible to expand into Asia or not, but of course, if the business aims to expand into Asia, then getting funding of between 10 million yen to 30 million yen could be possible from Coent. However, Ito and Maekawa said they will not limit a decision to the business area and the client target.
Ito added:
Our mission is to send talented people to the venture business field and encourage the creation of new industries. To make this happen, we want to support entrepreneurs who can create new fields where more talented people are willing to join.
If the idea of creating new industries excites you, then you have chemistry with them. If you are a budding entrepreneur starting a new business, why not contact them? Slogan is also recruiting talented students as well as entrepreneurs who want to work with startups. Contact them.
Translated by Chieko Frost via Mother First Edited by Kurt Hanson and Masaru Ikeda Proofread by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Pixta, a Tokyo-based company providing online stock photo service under the same name, had its IPO application with the Tokyo Stock Exchange approved today. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 14 September with plans to offer 180,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 68,400 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 277,900 shares. The underwriting will be led by Nomura Securities. Its share price range will be released on 3 September, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on 27 August. See also: Japanese stock photo service Pixta opens in Taiwan, sees 500% YoY increase Japan’s leading stock photo site shoots for the Asia market According to the consolidated statement as of December 2014, they posted a revenue of 1.07 billion yen ($8.6 million) and an ordinary profit of 98 million yen ($790,000). Their latest quarter revenue was 649 million yen ($5.2 million) with an operating profit of 74 million yen ($594,000). Major shareholders include Pixta CEO Daisuke Komata (29.27%), Global Capital Partners (22.19%), and PE&HR (16.45%). Pixta was incorporated in August 2005 as the previous name of Onboard, followed by the launch of the Pixta online stock…
Japan’s Pixta, a Tokyo-based company providing online stock photo service under the same name, had its IPO application with the Tokyo Stock Exchange approved today. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 14 September with plans to offer 180,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 68,400 shares in over-allotment options for a total of 277,900 shares. The underwriting will be led by Nomura Securities. Its share price range will be released on 3 September, bookbuilding is scheduled to start on 27 August.
According to the consolidated statement as of December 2014, they posted a revenue of 1.07 billion yen ($8.6 million) and an ordinary profit of 98 million yen ($790,000). Their latest quarter revenue was 649 million yen ($5.2 million) with an operating profit of 74 million yen ($594,000). Major shareholders include Pixta CEO Daisuke Komata (29.27%), Global Capital Partners (22.19%), and PE&HR (16.45%).
Pixta was incorporated in August 2005 as the previous name of Onboard, followed by the launch of the Pixta online stock photo service in 2006. The website allows amateur and professional photographers to upload and sell their photos online, which is the largest service in this sector in the Japanese market. According to Tech in Asia’s report of April 2014, the company has a staff of 70 and has attracted over 120,000 photographers.
See the original story in Japanese. Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone. In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company. See also: Telkomsel and Google Bring Free Mobile Internet to Indonesia (Tech in Asia) Facebook’s Internet.org app brings free mobile internet to the Philippines (Tech in Asia) Airtel, Google give customers free internet service (Vanguard) Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points…
Yoyo Holdings, the startup behind PopSlide, a rewards platform for smartphone users in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, recently partnered with Voyager Innovations (hereafter called Voyager), a subsidiary of Philippine Communications giant PLDT/Smart, and started offering Popslide’s service geared toward users of Voyager’s free internet service, SafeZone.
In partnership with 19 major brands like Zalora, Skyscanner, Philippine Airlines , SafeZone offers free mobile internet service in exchange for using these brands’ online services. In countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Nigeria, free mobile internet connection services are being offered as part of service promotions from Facebook, Google, and others, but SafeZone, in emulation of these concepts, has made it possible for multiple brands to offer connection service over a shared platform led by the telecom company.
Through PopSlides participation with SafeZone, SafeZone users in the Philippines who have accumulated reward points on PopSlide by seeing ads displayed on their lock screen, will be able to easily use those points to enjoy free mobile internet service. Currently there are 800,000 PopSlide users in the Southeast Asia region, but with the development of this partnership, they can expect an influx of some percentage of the Philippines 2 million SafeZone users to begin using the PopSlide service.
Yoyo Holdings co-founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada commented on the partnership with SafeZone.
Both PopSlide and SafeZone(or YOYO and Voyager) have the same vision of inspiring progress in society by providing free access to the internet through its products and partners. I’m sure that this partnership will foster more impactful collaborations through the union of business and technology.
I am so glad to be able to start providing bigger opportunities in the Philippines through our partnership with SafeZone. This is just the beginning. I believe that this is just our first step in creating disruptive innovations in user experience across the region.
Voyager COO Benje Fernandez also commented on the new partnership.
With SafeZone, brands have the opportunity to be ever-present in the lives of users through a device they always carry with them wherever they go.” said Benjie Fernandez, COO of Voyager Innovations Inc.
Our latest partnership with PopSlide is inline with our vision of working with global startups to offer the complete digital lifestyle to the Filipino for free. Now PopSlide users can be rewarded with no data charges.
As for Yoyo Holdings, surely they will be working overtime with the increase in recognition of their service by partnering with the biggest local telco. In an interview with Fukada in May of this year, it was made clear that together, there are 1,000,000 users of Popslide and Candy, a service for getting points that can be exchanged for telephone charges, in southeast Asia, and that expansion into the Indian market will be within the year.
See the original story in Japanese. In central Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, there is a graduate university called the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, or IAMAS, which has turned out many well known creators. Recently, a new product has been introduced by the university. That product is the “Hikari Masu”, a wooden box for drinking Japanese sake featuring built-in LED lights that can be controlled through a special smartphone app to light up in different colors and patterns. The crowdfunding campaign for the “Hikari Masu” project began on July 7th and has now reached 60% of their funding goal with 54 days remaining. Funding will go towards mass production of the product. The “Hikari Masu” team was formed of graduates of IAMAS and professor Shigeru Kobayashi in September 2013 at an ideathon/hackathon aimed at new product development organized by established ventures in the area. It’s said that one day, when one member of the team who wanted to make a “masu” that lights up no matter what it took, suddenly built a prototype at home and brought it in, that was the deciding factor. Manufacturing will be handled by Gifu-based hand-crafted wooden box manufacturer Ohashi Ryoki, design and photography…
In central Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, there is a graduate university called the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, or IAMAS, which has turned out many well known creators. Recently, a new product has been introduced by the university.
That product is the “Hikari Masu”, a wooden box for drinking Japanese sake featuring built-in LED lights that can be controlled through a special smartphone app to light up in different colors and patterns.
The crowdfunding campaign for the “Hikari Masu” project began on July 7th and has now reached 60% of their funding goal with 54 days remaining. Funding will go towards mass production of the product.
The “Hikari Masu” team was formed of graduates of IAMAS and professor Shigeru Kobayashi in September 2013 at an ideathon/hackathon aimed at new product development organized by established ventures in the area. It’s said that one day, when one member of the team who wanted to make a “masu” that lights up no matter what it took, suddenly built a prototype at home and brought it in, that was the deciding factor.
Manufacturing will be handled by Gifu-based hand-crafted wooden box manufacturer Ohashi Ryoki, design and photography by local printing company Sun Messe, hardware development by Trigger Device, and project management and software engineering by Pasona Tech.
The movement from ideathons and hackathons, to prototyping, to finally creating a finished product is a very interesting process to follow. The amount of companies carrying this kind of technological strength in Japan is quite impressive.
If we continue to see the spread of this pattern of using crowdfunding platforms to turn ideas into tangible things, surely we’ll be seeing more and more interesting products coming from many different areas of the country.
See the original story in Japanese. WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. They started providing a premium edition in February, followed by participating in the pitch competition at Echelon in Singapore this July as the only team from Japan. We were told that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Spain and other countries. Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the Japanese startup behind WOVN.io, recently made two announcements: partnering with Recruit Communications, a marketing-focused subsidiary under Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), and launching SEO-enabled library WOVN++ in beta. Based on a partnership with Recruit Communications, WOVN.io will be implemented into various media websites provided by Recruit Holdings group companies. Coinciding with leveraging the company’s in-house online dictionary, the solution will be used to translate 12 websites into several languages, starting with English, Chinese and Korean, in 2015 Q3. In our previous articles covering WOVN.io, we have heard many voices from users concerned about how the solution will have an impact on SEO results. To address this issue, the company introduced a library called WOVN++ in Ruby and PHP, which creates a static HTML source code rather than dynamically generating a translated webpage so…
WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment only by adding a single Javascript code to the website source. They started providing a premium edition in February, followed by participating in the pitch competition at Echelon in Singapore this July as the only team from Japan. We were told that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Spain and other countries.
Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the Japanese startup behind WOVN.io, recently made two announcements: partnering with Recruit Communications, a marketing-focused subsidiary under Japan’s Recruit Holdings (TSE:6098), and launching SEO-enabled library WOVN++ in beta.
Based on a partnership with Recruit Communications, WOVN.io will be implemented into various media websites provided by Recruit Holdings group companies. Coinciding with leveraging the company’s in-house online dictionary, the solution will be used to translate 12 websites into several languages, starting with English, Chinese and Korean, in 2015 Q3.
In our previous articles covering WOVN.io, we have heard many voices from users concerned about how the solution will have an impact on SEO results. To address this issue, the company introduced a library called WOVN++ in Ruby and PHP, which creates a static HTML source code rather than dynamically generating a translated webpage so that translated pages are also scanned for search engine results.
Minimal Technologies CEO Takaharu Hayashi said that typical Japanese companies are less likely to forget SEO measures when establishing a media site or an e-commerce site which targets overseas markets.
Hayashi explained:
Even Google does not have much market share in China or Korea as well as in Japan; China is dominated by Baidu and Korea by Naver, where different SEO measures may be required respectively. WOVN++ can work well with these different local search engines, driving user traffic from many other countries. We will focus on optimizing our solution to more search engines in the Southeast Asian region.
One can use the WOVN++ library in beta regardless of which service plan subscribed to. Going forward, the company wants to support an additional feature allowing users to display their website in the upper level of search results.
WOVN.io earns 90% of its entire revenue stream from their enterprise plan users. Currently payable in Japanese yen, however, the company recently registered a branch office in California to enable accepting payments in US dollars; they can now improve the new feature to better serve users in Japan and the rest of the world.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by Masaru Ikeda and “Tex” Pomeroy
Yuki Sato
Junya Mori
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
Yukari Mitsuhashi
