Japan’s Abeja, Google Analytics for retail stores, secures $5M in series B round

SHARE:

abeja-platform_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Abeja, the company offering solutions for retail stores to improve customer path or traffic based on image analysis and machine learning technologies, announced today that it has fundraised 530 million yen (about $5 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) and Archetype Ventures in a series B round. This follows their 6-digit figure (in US dollars) series A funding from Salesforce Ventures in December of 2014.

Founded in September of 2012, followed by graduation from the 1st batch of the Orange Fab Asia acceleration program, Abeja has fundraised an undislcosed sum of investment from Keisuke Tomimatsu in an angel round in addition to Archetype, Inspire, Mitsbishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures and Sakura Internet in a seed round.

Abeja offers a suite of data analytics solutions for retail stores to improve their business, such as Abeja Behavior for analyzing customer flow line and detention time in a real store, Abeja Demographics for detecting the gender and age of visiting customers in addition to Abeja DMP for analyzing data from both online and offline sales. Abeja Platform, the company’s flagship cloud platform comprising of these solutions, has been adopted by more than 100 retail stores in Japan as this month. In other verticals, the company started a collaborative business with Japanese air-conditioning giant Daikin (TSE:6367) at its Technology Innovation Center last month.

See also:

Upon funding, Abeja has invited Ken Yasunaga, Managing Director of Strategic Investment Group at INCJ, to the management board while the company expects Archetype to support business development for B2B (business-to-business) and B2B2C (business to business to consumer) verticals.

In the space of customer path improvement solutions leveraging image analytics, Taiwan-based SkyRec, the winning team at pitch competitions at events like Slush Asia 2016 and Fukuoka Night, is reportedly poised to enter the Japanese market soon, which may produce fierce competition for Abeja on their local turf.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy