Cotobe, Japan’s answer to CrunchBase, aims to improve work environment at startups

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See the original story in Japanese.

Net Jinzai Bank is a new business team within Japanese staff-dispatching and outsourcing company Saint Media, primarily offering an executive and talent search service for tech and IoT (Internet of Things) startups in Japan. On Wednesday, the company officially launched a startup valuation and scoring database site called Cotobe. It gathers and scores information about startups’ corporate values, and provides them as a list. This service is available via the website, and also as a mobile app for Android and iOS.

The Cotobe site deals with listed and unlisted Japanese Internet companies as well as foreign companies run by Japanese entrepreneurs, gathers metrics like their amount of funding, annual sales, pageviews / unique visitors or the number of app downloads from publicly-available updates as well as the availability of stock options and average annual income by interviewing people involved. Then these metrics will be analyzed using a unique algorithm on the site so that users can easily compare startups at a glance. The breakdown of their targeted users is estimated to be job seekers (70%) and investors (30%), hence the service is seen being used for opportunities like finding new startups to work with or invest in.

Typical job seekers for startups in Japan may use a social recruiting service like Wantedly. According to the Cotobe team, in contrast to Wantedly focused on offering users with an intuitive approach by allowing them to feel the atmosphere and work environment of startups they are interested in working at, Cotobe can be defined as offering a data-proven standard in finding a new position. Especially for the convenience of job seekers, each profile of registered startups is linked to the one on Wantedly, if any.

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Considered an information resource for investments and funding updates on the startup landscape, the site plays a similar role as CrunchBase (US), CB Insights (US), Entrepredia (Japan), RocketPunch (Korea), Itjuzi (China), and 36kr’s database service (China).

Cotobe is provided free of charge, because it is part of activities to increase awareness of NET Jinzai Bank. Not just positive information for startups will be displayed on Cotobe so one can easily compare job information including average incomes from startups in the same industry. However, NET Jinzai Bank is going to publicize as much information as it can obtain, and contribute to improved status of startup workers by encouraging startup efforts to compete even under such an environment.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy and Masaru Ikeda