The Midokura team comprises 60 employees across six countries around the world
This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese.
Midokura Holdings Ltd., the company offering a software network virtualization technology, announced today that it has fundraised $20 million in a series B round. This round was led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ for Short) with participation from Simplex and Allen Miner. Simplex provides major Japanese banks with dealing systems while Allen Miner is chairman of Japanese VC firm Sunbridge Global Ventures who is also formerly Oracle Japan CEO. With the funding this time, the company has raised $44 million in total to date.
Midokura has not disclosed any financial details including valuation, shareholdings ratio and payment date upon fundraising. But the company claims that they will enhance development of Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) and new product line-ups as well as empowering their management and development teams.
Since its launch back in 2010, the company’s been led by Tatsuya Kato, chairman of the board and co-founder, who is a veteran entrepreneur also renowned for having served Japanese investment fund Globis as COO. Prior to launching Midokura, he was involved in managing notable Japanese IT companies such as Cybird (TSE:4823) and CSK Holdings (TSE:9737).
Headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, Midokura runs its business operations at six different locations worldwide, though substantial headquarter operations is found in Tokyo. According to Kato who is based out of Tokyo, their system development team is based out of Barcelona, Spain while the San Francisco team is in charge of marketing operations.
The company has been developing MEM, a software network virtualization technology which replaces hardware network devices with a series of software, enabling service providers to reduce installation and maintenance costs for network environment.
Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
Tokyo-based Umami, the Japanese company behind the restaurant mobile app for foreign visitors under the same name, announced last week that it had fundraised 50 million yen (about $466,000) in a seed round. Participating investors in this round were Voyage Ventures, Fujita Kanko (TSE:9722), CSAJ Startup and other undisclosed four companies. Voyage Ventures is the investment arm of Japanese internet company Voyage Group (TSE:3688) while Fujita Kanko is the owner company of notable Japanese hotel chains such as Chinzanso and Washington Hotels. Upon gaining this funding, Umami wants to focus more on driving hotel guests from foreign countries to restaurants and recreational services in town. Since its launch back in April of 2015, the Umami mobile app has been adopted by about 250 restaurants in Japan. The app allows restaurants to provide their menu in English, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Korean as well as Japanese, attract customers through coupons, and spread words using social network services so that they can better reach out to foreign visitors. For customers, it helps them find restaurants following their dining preference using a recommendation feature, making orders at a restaurant in their mother tongue and choosing allergy-free or halal food menus.
Tokyo-based Umami, the Japanese company behind the restaurant mobile app for foreign visitors under the same name, announced last week that it had fundraised 50 million yen (about $466,000) in a seed round. Participating investors in this round were Voyage Ventures, Fujita Kanko (TSE:9722), CSAJ Startup and other undisclosed four companies. Voyage Ventures is the investment arm of Japanese internet company Voyage Group (TSE:3688) while Fujita Kanko is the owner company of notable Japanese hotel chains such as Chinzanso and Washington Hotels. Upon gaining this funding, Umami wants to focus more on driving hotel guests from foreign countries to restaurants and recreational services in town.
Since its launch back in April of 2015, the Umami mobile app has been adopted by about 250 restaurants in Japan. The app allows restaurants to provide their menu in English, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Korean as well as Japanese, attract customers through coupons, and spread words using social network services so that they can better reach out to foreign visitors. For customers, it helps them find restaurants following their dining preference using a recommendation feature, making orders at a restaurant in their mother tongue and choosing allergy-free or halal food menus.
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on Silicon Valley for aspiring innovation ecosystems. Spot quiz: What region is formerly known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight ? Here’s a hint: it’s not Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts, nor is it Berlin, East London, and especially not Saclay, France. A swathe of apple orchards and orange groves spanning Santa Clara County in Northern California is what gave Silicon Valley this original nickname. In 1953, transistor inventor William Shockley left Bell Labs, moved to Mountain View, California and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the belief that silicon would be a better material than the conventional germanium for making transistors. Shockley was a brilliant engineer but proved a terrible manager, so in 1957 eight of his best engineers (including a character by the name of Gordon Moore)…
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here.
Spot quiz: What region is formerly known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight ?
Here’s a hint: it’s not Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts, nor is it Berlin, East London, and especially not Saclay, France.
A swathe of apple orchards and orange groves spanning Santa Clara County in Northern California is what gave Silicon Valley this original nickname. In 1953, transistor inventor William Shockley left Bell Labs, moved to Mountain View, California and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory with the belief that silicon would be a better material than the conventional germanium for making transistors. Shockley was a brilliant engineer but proved a terrible manager, so in 1957 eight of his best engineers (including a character by the name of Gordon Moore) quit and went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
This is of course only one little excerpt of a fascinating story, but it seems timely to review the history of the creation of Silicon Valley as various governments from Europe to Asia periodically attempt to replicate Silicon Valley in their local geographies.
I’m a Silicon Valley native. My first residence when I entered the world almost four decades ago was in Tiburon, an island just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Besides a brief stint in Tokyo, I spent much of my childhood growing up in Los Altos, a sleepy residential town smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. I attended the same high school as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Cupertino, albeit almost two decades later.
We knew our region as Silicon Valley (not “The Valley”, as people that never lived there sometimes call it). However, as kids, we didn’t necessarily realize that we were a part of something so unique. The high-tech boom of the 80’s was in full swing, though it was about designing microprocessors rather than designing mobile apps.
HP, VisiCorp, and Varian were like the Google, Facebook, and Box of the era. Entrepreneurship was a natural reflex, not something to be forcibly learned. I recall my first entrepreneurial experience at the age of 15 which began with a paper route and, encouraged by a more industrious neighborhood kid, evolved into locking up town-wide distribution for the local newspapers and subsequently hiring junior high kids for pennies to perform the actual delivery. The San Jose Mercury News was the big brand, but the lower-quality Peninsula Times Tribune proved a nice complement with its fatter margins.
Maybe it was due to the omnipresent earthquake risk (I recall the menacing San Andreas fault line ran right down our street), but the prevalent vibe was the cycle of creating, enterprising, destroying, and rebuilding. Of course there were the folkloric stories of tinkerers in garages launching tech companies. Less often reported were the far more numerous incidents of lifestyle entrepreneurs creating small businesses: dry cleaners, pizzerias, and ice cream parlours. And just as Fairchild Semiconductor later gave way to Intel, the ice cream parlours were disrupted by frozen yogurt shops. It’s no coincidence that of the three aforementioned Silicon Valley corporate titans of the 80’s, only one name is recognizable today – HP – and it’s not exactly a poster-child for the visionary companies list nowadays.
So amidst the variety of well-intentioned innovation initiatives (most recently Japan’s plan for Tokyo as the Fintech capital of Asia), I submit that it’s worthwhile to study how Silicon Valley came to be what it is today. Some lessons may be relevant for Japan, others less so. In the spirit of constructive brainstorming, in part two of this series I’ll expound on the confluence of factors which transformed the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo- / Taipei-based ST Booking (previously known as Hakodate Ventures), the startup offering an education services marketplace under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised $200,000 in a seed round from several investors including Singapore-based Beenext and Tokyo-based IF Angel. ST Booking was founded in September 2015 by Shota James Morikawa, a former associate at East Ventures as well as a former director at Japanese startup Hyper8. In addition to Morikawa as CEO, Tiffany Wu, vice president at Taiwanese angel/seed fund Pinehurst Advisors, and Mark Hsu, co-founder of Pinehurst, joined the company as founding members. ST Booking is a matching platform for connecting Southeast Asian students wishing to study abroad to Japanese educational institutions. Tying up with 60 language schools or business colleges in Japan, and more than 1,100 agencies in Taiwan, Thailand or Vietnam, ST Booking approaches with both B2B via agencies and B2C by directly acquiring students. The recent Japanese government effort to attract 300,000 international students a year by 2020 is having a positive impact on the service. It monetizes with a “results reward” model; educational institutions will be charged 15 to 25% commission of the school fees. In…
Tokyo- / Taipei-based ST Booking (previously known as Hakodate Ventures), the startup offering an education services marketplace under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised $200,000 in a seed round from several investors including Singapore-based Beenext and Tokyo-based IF Angel.
ST Booking was founded in September 2015 by Shota James Morikawa, a former associate at East Ventures as well as a former director at Japanese startup Hyper8. In addition to Morikawa as CEO, Tiffany Wu, vice president at Taiwanese angel/seed fund Pinehurst Advisors, and Mark Hsu, co-founder of Pinehurst, joined the company as founding members.
Shota James Morikawa delivered his pitch at B Dash Camp 2016 Spring in Fukuoka in March 2016. (Image credit: ST Booking)
ST Booking is a matching platform for connecting Southeast Asian students wishing to study abroad to Japanese educational institutions. Tying up with 60 language schools or business colleges in Japan, and more than 1,100 agencies in Taiwan, Thailand or Vietnam, ST Booking approaches with both B2B via agencies and B2C by directly acquiring students.
The recent Japanese government effort to attract 300,000 international students a year by 2020 is having a positive impact on the service. It monetizes with a “results reward” model; educational institutions will be charged 15 to 25% commission of the school fees. In the future, it aims to develop a CRM to optimize sponsorship relations with companies for employment after graduation or the study abroad processes.
Mark Hsu, one of the aforementioned founding members, is known as an investor in startups but also has been running a business called Envision Recruit, helping educational institutions market their services in Taiwan and other countries. His vast network and deep experience in this sector will be greatly beneficial to operating the ST Booking business. Furthermore, thanks to the Vietnamese educational ministry’s decision adding Japanese as the first foreign language to learn at elementary schools, the local rush to study Japanese is on a rise. While Singapore-incorporated ST Booking has offices in Tokyo and Taiwan, their team members appear to be busy traveling around the entire Southeast Asian region for sales and marketing.
ST Booking aims to use the fund to launch new services, increase brand awareness and enhance network building with more agencies in the region.
The ST Booking team members discuss with each other at an office in Vietnam. CEO Morikawa sits in the middle while co-founder Hsu stands on the left. Image credit: ST Booking
See the original story in Japanese. Various instant e-commerce platforms or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading platforms, which an individual can readily make use of, have been started up in recent years. This active situation can be recognized from the growth of players in this field such as Mercari, Base, and Store.jp. As trading of “things” occurs, logistics become necessary. Others seem to be growing with this flow as well. Tokyo-based OpenLogi, which provides an outsourced logistics platform, announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised 210 million yen (about $1.9 million) from IMJ Investment Partners (IMJ-IP), SMBC Venture Capital and Infinity Ventures LLP. Coinciding with the funding, partner of IMJ-IP Hiroshi Oka has been appointed as an outside director. This fund will be spent for enhancing human resources. According to OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito, the firm plans to increase the number of members up to about 25 from the current 15 (including 9 engineers). Concurrently it promotes business development overseas such as in Southeast Asia, also in cooperation with IMJ-IP. I covered OpenLogi for the first time just a year ago. Please check out the previous article about their “optimization of warehouses and logistics business.” Ito explains that the firm has been…
Various instant e-commerce platforms or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) trading platforms, which an individual can readily make use of, have been started up in recent years. This active situation can be recognized from the growth of players in this field such as Mercari, Base, and Store.jp.
As trading of “things” occurs, logistics become necessary. Others seem to be growing with this flow as well.
Tokyo-based OpenLogi, which provides an outsourced logistics platform, announced on Tuesday that it has fundraised 210 million yen (about $1.9 million) from IMJ Investment Partners (IMJ-IP), SMBC Venture Capital and Infinity Ventures LLP. Coinciding with the funding, partner of IMJ-IP Hiroshi Oka has been appointed as an outside director.
This fund will be spent for enhancing human resources. According to OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito, the firm plans to increase the number of members up to about 25 from the current 15 (including 9 engineers). Concurrently it promotes business development overseas such as in Southeast Asia, also in cooperation with IMJ-IP.
I covered OpenLogi for the first time just a year ago. Please check out the previous article about their “optimization of warehouses and logistics business.”
OpenLogi CEO Hidetsugu Ito (Image credit: OpenLogi)
Ito explains that the firm has been focusing in particular on the optimization of its warehouse control system for a year. Since many of the contracted warehouses are located in the Tokorozawa area (suburban Tokyo), the firm moved its office to Ikebukuro (transit hub to the Tokorozawa are) and sometimes has a meeting with the developer team even at a warehouse.
Over the past year, the firm has tackled “improvement of efficiency of warehouse work.”
To ship and stock goods in warehouses via OpenLogi, users only have to ask transportation companies to carry them after member registration on the website. As a result, some of the users send out goods without care.
Ito explains:
For example, when a user sends three goods of A, B, and C, he / she inputs information about the goods to OpenLogi’s system in advance, but sometimes differences between the arrived goods and the inputted contents can be seen. Although we had handled these cases through confirmation with chat tools so far, we have enabled warehouse operators to communicate directly with users only by receiving photos taken with iPad.
As reported previously, each warehouse has a unique work method or style. To optimize all of them by considering it as one large warehouse virtually, standardization of warehouse work is needed.
Ito mentioned the difficulties in standardization:
The standardization of warehouse work was not easy. For example, one warehouse operator requires photos of goods, while another requires clothes to be folded. We classified requests from warehouse operators into patterns, and we advanced standardization in the system side.
Image credit: OpenLogi
The firm contracts with several warehouse bases as of now, acquiring one company each month. As for the charging system, conventional uniform charge was tuned to be variable according to the number of shipment or work quantity.
Most of players, intending to bring forth a new business phase by making conventional business move online, generally starts from optimization of the business practices or operation in that field by leveraging technologies, as seen in laundry or printing industry. OpenLogi seems to have completed that phase as well, and is entering to the expansion phase. We will continue to follow their future growth.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Creema, the Japanese startup behind C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace for handmade items under the same name, announced that it fundraised about 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) in the latest round led by Globis Capital Partners (GCP). For Creema, this is the fourth round following the previous 100 million yen funding from KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF for short, jointly operated by leading Japanese telco KDDI and VC firm Global Brain) back in June 2014. In addition to GCP, participating investors in the latest round were KDDI, Global Brain and SMBC Venture Partners, in addition to Creema founder/CEO Kotaro Marubayashi himself. Launched back in 2010, the Creema marketplace lists more than 2.4 million handmade items from over 60,000 registered creators. While the handmade C2C market in Japan grew by 250% YoY in transaction volume, Creema revealed that they had seen a 450% growth from last year. Currently the Japanese handmade market is fiercely competitive as it has in operation more than 40 marketplaces within. However apparently most deals are being aggregated into the top 4 marketplaces: Minne (backed by GMO), Tetote (backed by GMO), Iichi (backed by Hakuhodo group and Taiwan’s handmade C2C marketplace…
L to R: Tomohiro Ebata (Director, Head of Business Development and Investment, KDDI), Keisuke Tatsuoka (Global Brain), Kotaro Maruyabayashi (CEO, Creema), Akihiro Higashi (Principal, Globis Capital Partners), Minoru Konno (Partner & COO, Globis Capital Partners)
Tokyo-based Creema, the Japanese startup behind C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace for handmade items under the same name, announced that it fundraised about 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million) in the latest round led by Globis Capital Partners (GCP). For Creema, this is the fourth round following the previous 100 million yen funding from KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF for short, jointly operated by leading Japanese telco KDDI and VC firm Global Brain) back in June 2014. In addition to GCP, participating investors in the latest round were KDDI, Global Brain and SMBC Venture Partners, in addition to Creema founder/CEO Kotaro Marubayashi himself.
Launched back in 2010, the Creema marketplace lists more than 2.4 million handmade items from over 60,000 registered creators. While the handmade C2C market in Japan grew by 250% YoY in transaction volume, Creema revealed that they had seen a 450% growth from last year.
Currently the Japanese handmade market is fiercely competitive as it has in operation more than 40 marketplaces within. However apparently most deals are being aggregated into the top 4 marketplaces: Minne (backed by GMO), Tetote (backed by GMO), Iichi (backed by Hakuhodo group and Taiwan’s handmade C2C marketplace Pinkoi) and the amply-funded Creema.
Creema will use the funds to strengthen system development as well as marketing efforts for service recognition. They had been dependent for such recognition upon word of mouth among users, now expecting to hit 10 billion yen (about $92 million) in gross merchandise volume for 2016 (this number is coincidentally matched with that of competitor Minne).
Creema’s mobile app
According to Marubayashi, the average market price for each deal at Creema is over twice that at other marketplaces since users therein tend to trade handmade items with elaborate designs crafted by professionals. Recently Creema started dealing with food products where bakers and pâtissière sell their original breads or cakes while farmers sell handmade salad dressings and juices.
The consolidated annual merchandise volume from the two major C2C marketplaces of Japan, Yahoo Auction and Mercari, is to near the 1 trillion yen (or about $9.2 billion) mark by this yearend. Given that handmade item deals are included in these stats, we can see that the handmade item marketplaces still have a great potential for further growth.
Takeshi Hirano
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
