Tokyo-based Ookami, the Japanese startup developing the “Player!” sports entertainment app, announced on Friday that the company raised an undisclosed amount from IMJ Investment Partners (IMJ-IP), Gree Ventures, The Asahi Shimbun, and a number of confidential individual investors in a Series A round. For Ookami, this follows an undisclosed amount raised in a seed round from Gree Ventures last May, making this Gree Venture’s second investment in the company.
Prior to the seed round, Ookami held angel rounds in June of 2014 and March of 2015, in which they raised a total of 30 million yen (around $260K US) from athlete Dai Tamesue, Uzabase, Uzabase CEO Yusuke Umeda, Tomohito Ebine (founder of OPT Holdings), and Toshiaki Komatsu (Co-founder of Photocreate), but according to information from the stakeholders the total amount raised this time in the Series A round is expected to be on a scale of several hundred million yen (or several million US dollars).
Ookami was founded in April of 2014. In April 2015 they released the mobile app “Player!” for iOS, and pivoted from a sports news distribution platform to the one that reports sports games live, with a social network function that allows users to share their reactions in real-time with other users watching the progress and results of the same game. In December 2015 it was labeled the “App Store Best of 2015”, and in 2016 it won the “Good Design Award.”
Ookami revealed plans to strengthen the news distribution functions of Player! In addition to revamping the news functions, they will partner with a major data stadium for the broadcasting of sports scores, and information regarding both J-league football and B-league basketball games in Japan will be offered in real time. Additionally, their information can be further enriched through their partnership with the Asahi Shimbun, a company that participates in some 180 sports events in Japan yearly.
The Asahi Shumbun, participants in this round, released the following comments in excerpt.
We believe that through multiplying various sports businesses and contents with Ookami’s Player!, a new way of enjoying sports, and communicating about sports, separate from a newspaper, becomes possible; so we entered into the partnership.
GREE Ventures, who participated in the latest investment round along with IMJ-IP, appears to make a pure money injection. The following is an excerpt from comments by IMJ-IP.
With the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, the field of sports is expected to experience great growth in Japan. As a part of this, we recognize the fact that Player! is a new medium that makes live sports content possible and offers the optimal smart-phone customer experience, and judge that their management team is one of high executive power, so we have made the decision to support them.
Image credit: ookami
Although Ookami created the above figure (and therefore it is not necessarily an objective interpretation), the digital distribution of sports content is definitely bustling, even with profitable and not so profitable players.
To illustrate other digital sports startups in Japan, there is Spotomo and Spotomo GC, which offer online lesson services, with investors like Docomo Ventures, DeNA (TSE: 2432), Sirius Partners, and ABC Dream Ventures. Link Sports, which runs the amateur sports score and competition management service TeamHub, raised about 60 million yen (around $523K US) in financing from Venture United and debt from the Japan Policy Finance Corporation.
In Japan, DAZN (pronounced dazon) and Softbank’s Suponavi Live are advancing, challenging each other over Internet and mobile distribution, leading to a rise in broadcasting fees. However, they alone cannot consume all the video distribution, and it seems there is a development in which they discount and resell (sublicense) the broadcasting rights to other satellite broadcasters and cable television broadcasting companies. Overseas, Twitter contributes $10 million US to streamcast NFL games worldwide, and Amazon is moving to acquire broadcasting rights for sports.
For Ookami, Player! is not a distributor of sports video content, but instead focuses on score information related to games as well as SNS, thereby leaving them unaffected by these big players. Instead, through the benefit of sublicensing, etc., in the future it will be possible to deliver videos by revenue sharing with the broadcasting rights holder.
Ookami CEO Taiyo Ogata says:
I think it is possible to create a flexible operation if you can watch and listen to programs on a game-by-game basis (not on a per-channel basis), or if the price is changed when you watch from the second half.
60% of Player!’s users are under 35, a demographic that existing sports broadcasters are not reaching. In terms of being able to distribute video to this demographic, I think that it will be possible for major platformers to merge with Ookami.
Ogata also revealed that they are preparing several other user experiences only possible through Player! I look forward to a number of big announcements this year which can be expected in connection to this.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Kyoto-based Darma Tech Labs, which runs the Makers Boot Camp (MBC) hardware startup-focused accelerator, announced in Kyoto on Tuesday that it is forming an investment fund worth 2 billion yen (nearly $18 million US) with having Kyoto Bank (TSE: 8369) as an anchor limited partner. In addition to Narimasa Makino, CEO of Darma Tech Labs, Shingo Nadaka the Deputy Director of local manufacturing organization Kyoto Shisaku Net, and Director Masatoshi Takeda (also Director of Darma Tech Labs), and Masahiko Naka, the Executive Director of Kyoto Bank also attended the press briefing held on that day. The fund is called MBC Shisaku No. 1 Investment LP and its redemption period is 10 years. They will intensively invest in early stage hardware startups in Japan, North America, and Europe. Priority investment areas include IoT, robotics, sensing, networking, big data analysis, medical devices, nursing care, lifestyle, environment and energy. Along with forming this fund, Mikuni Kimura, the former chief investment officer for Future Venture Capital, along with certified public accountant Manabu Kuwahara will participate as managing directors at Darma Tech Labs, and expanding their field of partners by joining with New York City-based FabFoundry, the CEO Nobuhiro…
From left: Shingo Nadaka (Deputy Director of Kyoto Shisaku Net), Masatoshi Takeda (Director of Darma Tech Labs/ Director of Kyoto Shisaku Net), Narimasa Makino (CEO of Darma Tech Labs), Masahiko Naka (Executive Director of Kyoto Bank) Image credit: Darma Tech Labs
Kyoto-based Darma Tech Labs, which runs the Makers Boot Camp (MBC) hardware startup-focused accelerator, announced in Kyoto on Tuesday that it is forming an investment fund worth 2 billion yen (nearly $18 million US) with having Kyoto Bank (TSE: 8369) as an anchor limited partner.
In addition to Narimasa Makino, CEO of Darma Tech Labs, Shingo Nadaka the Deputy Director of local manufacturing organization Kyoto Shisaku Net, and Director Masatoshi Takeda (also Director of Darma Tech Labs), and Masahiko Naka, the Executive Director of Kyoto Bank also attended the press briefing held on that day.
The fund is called MBC Shisaku No. 1 Investment LP and its redemption period is 10 years. They will intensively invest in early stage hardware startups in Japan, North America, and Europe. Priority investment areas include IoT, robotics, sensing, networking, big data analysis, medical devices, nursing care, lifestyle, environment and energy.
Along with forming this fund, Mikuni Kimura, the former chief investment officer for Future Venture Capital, along with certified public accountant Manabu Kuwahara will participate as managing directors at Darma Tech Labs, and expanding their field of partners by joining with New York City-based FabFoundry, the CEO Nobuhiro Seki will be appointed as a director of Darma Tech Labs.
Darma Tech Labs, the facilitators of MBC, also regularly holds Monozukuri Hub Meetup at the co-working space MTRL Kyoto (Material Kyoto) to focus on creating a community of hardware startups. At the Monozukuri Hardware Cup, held for the first time in Osaka in February, eight hardware startup teams from Japan came, with the three teams of QD Laser, PLENGoer, and VAQSO, being invited to the Hardware Startup Pitch Competition put on by the Pittsburgh-based hardware startup AlphaLab Gear.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
This is a guest post by Mari Futagami, Community Manager of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator Makers Boot Camp. The accelerator holds the Monozukuri Hub Meetup event in Kyoto on a monthly basis. Additionally, all photos in this article were provided by professional photographer Miki Matsuura of Tumiki Photo. See the original story in Japanese. Monozukuri Hardware Cup 2017 was held for the first time in conjunction with Hack Osaka 2017 on 9th February. It is a pitch event hosted by Monozukuri Hardware Startup Consortium aiming to be a stepping stone for the Japanese “monozukuri” (referring to manufacturing in Japanese) startups which can potentially be successful around the world. Monozukuri Hardware Startup Consortium is organized by Darma Tech Labs (Kyoto), FabFoundry (New York City), and TechShop Japan (Minato-ku, Tokyo), and this pitch event is treated as the Japanese regional preliminary of National Hardware Cup which has been held in the US since 2015. Although typical national events in Japan are often held in Tokyo, Monozukuri Hardware Cup will be held in Kansai area for the next three years including this time. Hardware Cup Final has been held in Pittsburgh since 2015, and there is a reason why the regional city was…
This is a guest post by Mari Futagami, Community Manager of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator Makers Boot Camp. The accelerator holds the Monozukuri Hub Meetup event in Kyoto on a monthly basis.
Additionally, all photos in this article were provided by professional photographer Miki Matsuura of Tumiki Photo.
Monozukuri Hardware Cup 2017 was held for the first time in conjunction with Hack Osaka 2017 on 9th February. It is a pitch event hosted by Monozukuri Hardware Startup Consortium aiming to be a stepping stone for the Japanese “monozukuri” (referring to manufacturing in Japanese) startups which can potentially be successful around the world.
Monozukuri Hardware Startup Consortium is organized by Darma Tech Labs (Kyoto), FabFoundry (New York City), and TechShop Japan (Minato-ku, Tokyo), and this pitch event is treated as the Japanese regional preliminary of National Hardware Cup which has been held in the US since 2015. Although typical national events in Japan are often held in Tokyo, Monozukuri Hardware Cup will be held in Kansai area for the next three years including this time.
Hardware Cup Final has been held in Pittsburgh since 2015, and there is a reason why the regional city was chosen to be the host for the final of the event. Pittsburgh had once flourished as a town of steel industry, but its regional economy was seriously damaged by imported cheap steel in the 1970s. However, Pittsburgh, the city also known as an academic city having good universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, shifted its industrial base into high technology, as well as health, education or finance, and had gradually transformed into a new city since the 1980s.
Attracting innovative sections of top IT players including Google, Apple and Facebook, Pittsburgh has been developing into a more creative environment. Based in such a place, the hardware-focused accelerator AlphaLab Gear, chosen as one of the top 20 programs by Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, hosted Hardware Cup Final. AlphaLab Gear team has been creating an organic ecosystem in Pittsburgh as a key player, tying up with the academic / industrial world in addition to VCs.
Ilana Diamond, Chief of AlphaLab Gear, explained the reason for holding Hardware Cup:
In the US, hardware startups have more difficulties in fundraising rather than web or app startups. I think that is because they could not gain enough understanding of investors or media.
Pitches and exhibition booths
Exhibition booths were set for eight participant startups where visitors can try their products. By allowing them to actually touch and experience the products, their understanding of the hardware development seemed to deepen, and also active communication among startups came to be seen.
In the pitch competition, each team gave a pitch within four minutes and dealt with questions from the judges all in English in five minutes. Under the same regulation with the final, the eight teams competed for a ticket for the final in Pittsburgh.
Atmoph
Gyeong-il Kan, Co-founder / CEO of Atmoph
The first presenter was Kyoto-based Atmoph which developed the world’s first digital smart window under the same name and aims to spread a new travel experience to homes. Co-Founder / CEO of Atomoph Kan’s experience of window-less environment in the US triggered him to start development of the smart window.
With beautiful moving scenery images displayed on the liquid crystal screen and sounds all over the world such as Hawaii, New Zealand, Switzerland or Patagonia, Atmoph provides users to get a feel for actually being there. All images were originally photographed in 4K resolution by partnered cameramen. Currently, more than 500 images of 30 countries have been uploaded and one can purchase them via the app. The window is also able to display daily life information such as weather forecasts or time.
The team is eyeing possibilities for application to health-care or home hub uses.
Dendama
Yoshihiro Otani, CEO of Dendama (right)
Dendama offers an IoT (Internet of Things) kendama (Japanese cup-and-ball toy) under the same name capable of online match games. The player population of kendama is said to be 3 million in Japan and the kendama boom is gradually spreading globally. Dendama is equipped with a sensor capable of discriminating complicated kendama skills by linking with the app and enables online match games with players all over the world.
The team plans exhibition at Kickstarter and SXSW, and continues business activities with a view to linking with AR (augmented reality) technologies.
Lightflyer
Kaoru Kakinuma, CEO of Lightflyer
Lightflyer was spun out from The University of Tokyo and is going to offer the launching service of ultra-small satellites leveraging its know-how of “the microwave rocket” accumulated for 13 years. The launching apparatus costs only tens of thousands of dollars for each ultra-small satellite and that is one-hundredth of conventional ones.
The Lightflyer team has established a research and development in cooperation with the University of Tokyo or Carnegie Mellon University, making efforts to complete the unit to put satellites into low orbit.
Mille-Feuille
Yoshinari Kou, Mille-Feuille
The automated electronic schematic creation tool Mille-Feuille supports programmers or artists without specialized knowledge to freely design their own custom electronic circuits. Mille-Feuille is composed of base board, module board, and device board. Users can participate in designing of the device boards as open hardware and can even sell them.
While sales of device boards will become the first profit for the firm, it also plans to customize and sell the license of the electronic schematic creation tool and its firmware (they are Web tools) to user companies. Moreover, the team has a concept of preparing a marketplace focusing on device boards and offers services like Google Play.
PLENGoer Robotics
Atsuhiko Tomita, COO of PLENGoer Robotics
PLENGoer Robotics develops the original personal assistant robot. The team introduced this time a personal assistant robot capable of changing a general home into a smart home by controlling camera functions or household appliances, which was exhibited at CES too.
Unlike conventional cameras requiring pushing a shatter button, PLENGoer Robotics’ camera recognizes ideal photo opportunities and provides natural photos automatically.
Hironori Miyauchi, Business Development Manager, Visual Information Device Business Division, QD Laser
QD Laser develops the retina scanning type laser eyewear which projects images directly to wearer’s retina from the built-in laser projector on the eyewear frame. The number of visually handicapped people with impaired vision, who are not completely blind but have cloudy eyesight, totals at about 1.5 million in Japan and 250 million in the world including developing countries so this technology has a possibility of contributing to improvement of their quality of life.
With the specially designed optical system, QD Laser is able to project clear images regardless of the accommodation of eyes including eyesight or in-focus position. The team has been developing the glasses as medical instrument or welfare equipment in order to recover visual senses of visually handicapped people mainly caused by dysfunctions of anterior ocular segments such as corneas and lens. The team also implied the application possibilities in other fields such as AR or smart glasses where significant expansion is expected in the future.
Secual
Naoki Nishida, COO of Secual
Secual was founded in June of 2015, aiming to realize a new style of home security utilizing IoT. When the built-in sensor of the device installed on a window or a door detects unusual vibration, it transmits information to the firm’s center system via the gateway and notifies user’s smartphone of the analyzed information.
The device costs about $90 at least. Since it can be easily installed without requiring wiring works, the team approaches possible users who had gave up introducing home security due to high costs or installation limitations in rental houses, and aims to secure profit by setting $8.7 as the monthly charge.
The team is also developing new devices that work with Secual and is looking to various kinds of business development such as utilization in welfare facilities through strengthening cooperation with external organizations.
Vaqso develops the scent generation device attachable to HMD (head-mount display). Linking with VR contents, it is able to shoot out various realistic smells and provides VR experience with higher reality. The device can be installed to all HMD on the market.
After the pitch competition held at the communication area with a casual atmosphere, the awards ceremony was held at the main arena.
The scent device for VR Vaqso team took 3rd place and the personal assistant robot PLENGoer Robotics team took 2nd place. The top prize went to the retina scanning type laser eye-ware QD Laser team.
(From left) Jeffrey McDaniel, Hikari Takahashi, and Shuji Fujita as judges for the pitch competition
The chief judge of the pitch competition Jeffrey McDaniel, Executive-in-Residence of Innovation Works hosting the accelerator AlphaLab Gear, commented on Japanese hardware startups:
Presentation in English must be the great first step to make appeal to overseas investors. I hope you all grow up utilizing Japanese manufacturing background.
After the competition, judge Shuji Fujita (President of EO Osaka) and judge Hikari Takahashi (Co-founder of Brain Portal) gave advices to eight participant teams about the key to success in business development. Fujita and Takahashi made great efforts to support the Japanese startup culture.
Supplemental Prizes
Yoshiaki Tsuda, Chief Director, Digital Design Lab of All Nippon Airways which acts as the travel sponsor of this event
The qualifier QD Laser team was given a ticket to the pitch competition in Hardware Cup Final (19th to 20th April, Pittsburgh), as well as round-trip tickets from Japan to New York and travel expense support of $2,600 by the travel sponsor All Nippon Airways.
PLENGoer Robotics in 2nd place and Vaqso in 3rd place were given exhibition rights at demonstration area in Hardware Cup Final and travel expense supports ($1,800 for 2nd place and $880 for 3rd place) as well. Moreover, participation rights to Hardware Cup Demo Day which will be held either in New York or Pittsburgh will be awarded to all higher-ranking winners.
While it was the first Monozukuri Hardware Cup held this time, eight teams were chosen as finalists from 24 applicants through documentary elimination and competed fiercely to qualify for Hardware Cup Final by presenting their own products and business plan.
I hope that holding Monozukuri Hardware Cup continuously in the Kansai area will contribute to further growth of the Japanese hardware startups and become a foothold for creating the ecosystem of manufacturing.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. It has been five years since I first wrote a piece about Wantedly on Penn Olson (now known as Tech in Asia). I remember that I visited the Kayac (TSE:3904) office located in Ebisu to meet CEO Akiko Naka and others. Since Naka was actively providing lectures at many startup conferences such as RISE or Slush Asia (renamed today as Slush Tokyo), I mistakenly thought that Wantedly had already expanded its business globally, but actually this is the first time it is establishing an office overseas (without local offices, it had expanded into Indonesia with a foreign language version of Wantedly services in March of 2015). Wantedly revealed on Thursday that it will commence full-scale sales and promotion activities in the Singapore market, hiring four local staffs. Weiting Tan, who formerly served the last-minute hotel reservation app HotelQuickly as Marketing Manager, has been appointed Country Manager of the local subsidiary Wantedly Singapore. Its office will be established at the co-working space Spacemob near Orchard Road. In commemoration of the full-scale launch, the firm held a party at Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore from 15:30 (local time) this Thursday. Coinciding with the announcement, the…
It has been five years since I first wrote a piece about Wantedly on Penn Olson (now known as Tech in Asia). I remember that I visited the Kayac (TSE:3904) office located in Ebisu to meet CEO Akiko Naka and others.
Since Naka was actively providing lectures at many startup conferences such as RISE or Slush Asia (renamed today as Slush Tokyo), I mistakenly thought that Wantedly had already expanded its business globally, but actually this is the first time it is establishing an office overseas (without local offices, it had expanded into Indonesia with a foreign language version of Wantedly services in March of 2015).
Wantedly Singapore team: (L to R) Weiting Tan (Country Manager), Joelle Pang (Int’l Business Development) Image credit: Wantedly Singapore
Wantedly revealed on Thursday that it will commence full-scale sales and promotion activities in the Singapore market, hiring four local staffs. Weiting Tan, who formerly served the last-minute hotel reservation app HotelQuickly as Marketing Manager, has been appointed Country Manager of the local subsidiary Wantedly Singapore. Its office will be established at the co-working space Spacemob near Orchard Road. In commemoration of the full-scale launch, the firm held a party at Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore from 15:30 (local time) this Thursday.
Coinciding with the announcement, the firm launched the English version of the company visiting app Wantedly Visit for iOS. Although any plan about one for Android is not mentioned at this point, the firm declared that it will accelerate the business development to the Asian countries including Indonesia using the Singapore subsidiary as a hub, so that it seems that the app will also soon become available for Android as it is frequently used in these areas.
The company claims that over 20,000 companies in Japan have registered as users on Wantedly while the number of monthly visiting users have recently reached 1 million.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy, Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Updated on March 6: Dazzle CEO’s first name was corrected. Tokyo-based Dazzle, which develops mobile game apps as well as solution for virtual reality (VR) content developers, announced on Wednesday that they raised a total of 200 million yen (about $1.75 million US) in funds from the major construction/manufacturing engineer dispatch company Yumeshin Holdings (TSE: 2362, hereafter referred to as Yumeshin HD) and their subsidiary Yume Education which conducts training programs for IT engineers. This is in addition to the 150 million (about $1.3 million US) raised from Yumeshin HD in June of last year, bringing the total amount raised to 350 million yen (over $3 million US). Following this funding, the President of Yume Education Norikiyo Sato, and major game developer Acrodea’s (TSE: 3823) Director of Solutions Division and Executive Officer Ariro “Alex” Nagayama will serve as Corporate Auditors of Dazzle. Additionally, former Skymark CEO who currently serves as Representative Director of AirAsia Japan Takashi Ide was appointed as a management advisor. Yasuteru Yamada founded Dazzle in 2011 while still working as a freelance programmer (now, he is the CEO). In addition to Valiant Nights, a mobile game for Android and iOS, they…
Updated on March 6: Dazzle CEO’s first name was corrected.
Tokyo-based Dazzle, which develops mobile game apps as well as solution for virtual reality (VR) content developers, announced on Wednesday that they raised a total of 200 million yen (about $1.75 million US) in funds from the major construction/manufacturing engineer dispatch company Yumeshin Holdings (TSE: 2362, hereafter referred to as Yumeshin HD) and their subsidiary Yume Education which conducts training programs for IT engineers. This is in addition to the 150 million (about $1.3 million US) raised from Yumeshin HD in June of last year, bringing the total amount raised to 350 million yen (over $3 million US).
Following this funding, the President of Yume Education Norikiyo Sato, and major game developer Acrodea’s (TSE: 3823) Director of Solutions Division and Executive Officer Ariro “Alex” Nagayama will serve as Corporate Auditors of Dazzle. Additionally, former Skymark CEO who currently serves as Representative Director of AirAsia Japan Takashi Ide was appointed as a management advisor.
The team members of Dazzle. The second person from the right standing is Dazzle CEO Yasuteru Yamada. Image credit: Dazzle
Yasuteru Yamada founded Dazzle in 2011 while still working as a freelance programmer (now, he is the CEO). In addition to Valiant Nights, a mobile game for Android and iOS, they have released four VR game titles for Gear VR and HTC Vive. In recent years, R&D consultation on VR from companies has been increasing, and as a service for supporting the PDCA cycle of VR game products, they began to develop growth hack tools / middleware AccessiVR since last year.
In the closed beta version of AccessiVR only Microsoft DayDream devices are compatible, but Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive will be added in the official version. Also, Unity is the only supported language in closed beta, but they plan to add Unreal Engine for the official version, and they are aiming for it to correspond to Amazon Lumberyard in the future. To sequentially add functions required by developers, the company plans to implement budget management and operation plan management functions for setting target budgets and establishing KPI to compare budget forecasts.
AccessiVR’s dashboard Image credit: Dazzle
In the same business sphere, there are conflicts with Unity Analytics and Cognitive VR as overseas forces, but Unity Analytics can only deal with Unity, and because AccessiVR’s component is light, when it is incorporated into a VR game or content the fact that there is less loss to the FPS (frame per second) is said to be its technological merit. Following the participation of as many as 10 developers in closed beta tests, they aim for the official version to be out from June to July, and in partnering with VR Arcades, acquiring vital data through cooperation with IoT startups, they hope to differentiate themselves in terms of actual operation. I was reminded of visiting VR Space in Shibuya awhile back, where Executive Producer Akihito Ninomiya suggested that the VR Arcade could be used as a VR developer’s acquisition of growth hack data and as a marketing base.
Currently Dazzle has not received funding from any VCs. Yamada explained that if they were to receive funds from VC as a VR company, Dazzle would seek to specialize in VR only, and if they pursue funding as a specifically VR company, there is the possibility that their valuation could lower. He elaborated that after evaluating the game business that they were already able to monetize they sought to invest in a new business, and the company that understood that vision was Yumishin HD, leading to the acceptance of the investment.
There are around 40 employees at Dazzle including engineers, and in light of the fact that 2018-2019 the global VR industry is set to become vibrant, the in-house developers of smartphone games will gradually shift to the VR business. Using funds raised this time around, the company is focusing on strengthening the development engineers and support staff of AccessiVR.
See the original story in Japanese. Hong Kong-based Zeroth.ai, the accelerator focused on nurturing startups from Asia in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) verticals, announced on Friday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from and partnered with the region’s startup studio Mind Fund. Mind Fund is to invest in selected startups born out of Zeroth’s acceleration program batches. Zeroth.ai was launched back in July by Tak Lo who previously served TechStars, one of world-renowned startup accelerator networks, as director in New York City and London. Upon finishing the first batch program from Zeroth, 10 teams from the cohort recently pitched their final results at the firm’s latest Investor Day. Meanwhile, Mind Fund is a startup studio founded in 2010 by Adam Lindemann who previously served Tokyo-based VC/incubation firm Neoteny as business development manager. Neoteny was launched back in 1999 by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. In January this year, Mind Fund secured an undisclosed sum in funding from DG Incubation, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Digital Garage (TSE:4819), and the former claimed that it will provide startups in the blockchain, AI, FinTech-based payments fields with added support for expansion into the Asian market…
Hong Kong-based Zeroth.ai, the accelerator focused on nurturing startups from Asia in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) verticals, announced on Friday that it has fundraised an undisclosed sum from and partnered with the region’s startup studio Mind Fund. Mind Fund is to invest in selected startups born out of Zeroth’s acceleration program batches.
Zeroth.ai was launched back in July by Tak Lo who previously served TechStars, one of world-renowned startup accelerator networks, as director in New York City and London. Upon finishing the first batch program from Zeroth, 10 teams from the cohort recently pitched their final results at the firm’s latest Investor Day.
Meanwhile, Mind Fund is a startup studio founded in 2010 by Adam Lindemann who previously served Tokyo-based VC/incubation firm Neoteny as business development manager. Neoteny was launched back in 1999 by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. In January this year, Mind Fund secured an undisclosed sum in funding from DG Incubation, the investment arm of Japanese internet company Digital Garage (TSE:4819), and the former claimed that it will provide startups in the blockchain, AI, FinTech-based payments fields with added support for expansion into the Asian market in partnership with the Tokyo company (Editor’s note: Joi Ito is also one of Digital Garage’s managing directors.)
Upon Zeroth’s funding from Mind Fund this time around, we can expect that it will help AI startups in which the firm specializes enhance business into the Asian, Japanese and US markets since the funds from Digital Garage could be indirectly brought to Zeroth’s effort through the partnership with Mind Fund.
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
This is a guest post by Mari Futagami, Community Manager of Kyoto-based hardware startup accelerator 
