Tokyo-based From Scratch, the company behind an integrated digital marketing platform called B->Dash, announced on Tuesday that it has raised about 3.2 billion yen (about $28.4 million) from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) and Rakuten Ventures, in addition to existing investors.
This follows their previous 300 million yen ($2.4 million at the exchange rate then) funding in May of 2015 and 1 billion yen (about $8.3 million) funding in November of the same year. The latest funding means that the company has raised a total of 4.5 billion yen (about $40 million) in funding to date.
B->Dash is a web-based marketing platform that allows a company to integrate data from different points of their entire marketing process and analyze it comprehensively on an all-in-one basis.
The service’s major clients include Kirin Brewery and Okasan Online Securities. From Scratch will use the funds to enhance the marketing platform, especially by strengthening data integration and data processing capability as well as further development of artificial intelligence technologies.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Circle-in, developing the total support tool for international logistics works named Shippio, announced on Monday that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from 500 Startups Japan, YJ Capital, and East Ventures. This fundraising succeeds the one conducted through the Code Republic accelerator program jointly run by YJ Capital and East Ventures. Circle-in was founded in June of 2016 by Takanori Sato (CEO) and Takashi Tsuchiya (managing director), both of whom formerly worked at the Chinese base of Mitsui & Co. Subsequently, the firm participated in the 1st batch of the Code Republic accelerator program and presented PortHub, its international distribution optimization tool, as a web-based logistics optimization platform for SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises) at the Demo Day. Since the teaser website of PortHub is currently closed, it is surmised that the service has been re-branded into Shippio at this time. Shippio is a cloud-based platform for freight forwarders, export-import operators, trading companies and distribution department of enterprises, enabling simplication of complicated and time-consuming procedures such as communication via email / phone calls, document exchanges via FAX, spreadsheet-based trade management, in addition to helping improve business efficiency drastically and…
From left to right: Shinichiro Hori (YJ Capital), Batara Eto (East Ventures), Takashi Tsuchiya (Managing Director, Circle-in), Takanori Sato (CEO, Circle-in), Yohei Sawayama (500 Startups Japan), James Riney (500 Startups Japan)
Tokyo-based Circle-in, developing the total support tool for international logistics works named Shippio, announced on Monday that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount in a seed round from 500 Startups Japan, YJ Capital, and East Ventures. This fundraising succeeds the one conducted through the Code Republic accelerator program jointly run by YJ Capital and East Ventures.
Circle-in was founded in June of 2016 by Takanori Sato (CEO) and Takashi Tsuchiya (managing director), both of whom formerly worked at the Chinese base of Mitsui & Co. Subsequently, the firm participated in the 1st batch of the Code Republic accelerator program and presented PortHub, its international distribution optimization tool, as a web-based logistics optimization platform for SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises) at the Demo Day. Since the teaser website of PortHub is currently closed, it is surmised that the service has been re-branded into Shippio at this time.
Shippio is a cloud-based platform for freight forwarders, export-import operators, trading companies and distribution department of enterprises, enabling simplication of complicated and time-consuming procedures such as communication via email / phone calls, document exchanges via FAX, spreadsheet-based trade management, in addition to helping improve business efficiency drastically and visualize forwarding processes and payments. Its official launch is scheduled in mid-June this year.
Regarding this business field, San Francisco-based Flexport is leading the industry, having funraised a total of $94 million through its series A and B rounds from Founders Fund along with other investors. At last year’s TechSauce Summit pitch competition which was the first large startup conference in Thailand, GizTix providing a logistics marketplace for international distribution won the top prize. In addition, Spain-based cloud-based logistics management platform Shipwise won the Bronze Prize of the pitch competition in HackOsaka held last year, so this field is apparently one of the verticals garnering a lot of attention.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based medical ISV (independent service vendor) ShareMedical announced on Thursday their partnership with Fast Doctor, a company that provides night time in-home doctors visits, to begin offering a smart house call service in central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture. ShareMedical is developing an mobile app geared for patients who wish to use this service, and plans to make it available from August. ShareMedical was founded in September of 2014 by Yoshimasa Mine. Prior to it he was involved in launching Japanese hospital search portal QLife before. The company has released mobile apps such as a messaging tool called MediLine and a medical term-optimized IME (input method editor) called Ikotoba. The MediLine app supports efficient and safe communication among physicians of medical institutions focused on house calls, as electronic medical record systems and portable medical examination machines are spreading owing to the development of various technologies including communication. It is easy to use via a smartphone, so perhaps describing it as the “Medical Version of Line” is most understandable. For regular workers it is most common to take a day off from work to be examined by a doctor at a hospital. When it…
From left: Fast Doctor CEO Ryo Kikuchi, ShareMedical CEO Yoshimasa Mine Image credit: ShareMedical
Tokyo-based medical ISV (independent service vendor) ShareMedical announced on Thursday their partnership with Fast Doctor, a company that provides night time in-home doctors visits, to begin offering a smart house call service in central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture. ShareMedical is developing an mobile app geared for patients who wish to use this service, and plans to make it available from August.
ShareMedical was founded in September of 2014 by Yoshimasa Mine. Prior to it he was involved in launching Japanese hospital search portal QLife before. The company has released mobile apps such as a messaging tool called MediLine and a medical term-optimized IME (input method editor) called Ikotoba. The MediLine app supports efficient and safe communication among physicians of medical institutions focused on house calls, as electronic medical record systems and portable medical examination machines are spreading owing to the development of various technologies including communication. It is easy to use via a smartphone, so perhaps describing it as the “Medical Version of Line” is most understandable.
For regular workers it is most common to take a day off from work to be examined by a doctor at a hospital. When it is impossible to take time off, people seek medical institutions that offer nighttime treatment or rely on hospitals that have an emergency outpatient clinic; but, it is important to keep in mind the limited number of human resources in medical care when visiting the emergency room for issues that are not urgent. The accounting departments of hospitals are often closed at night, and it is sometimes necessary to pay extra cash in advance with the return to be settled at a later date; and, if there is no medical institution open in your neighborhood, it would be also difficult to secure transportation.
ShareMedical is aiming to begin, in a sense, the “Medical Version of Uber”. Users can register their credit card and health insurance information in advance on the app and request a doctor to visit when necessary. A driver takes the doctor on the house call so if first aid is necessary, the patient can communicate with the doctor until their arrival.
In this partnership, Fast Doctor will provide a network of house call doctors while ShareMedical will be responsible for providing a user experience that attracts prospective patients. According to the law, doctors are permitted to visit areas within a 16-kilometer radius from where the hospital is located; and to start with, ShareMedical’s service area will be a part of the central Tokyo and its adjacent Chiba prefecture centering on the offices of Fast Doctor. In the future, they are planning to increase the medical institutions and related facilities participating in this network, and to expand both ShareMedical and Fast Doctor’s services nationwide.
ShareMedical plans to undertake the reception processes of calculating the payments for medical services, as well as keeping track of medical fees and expenses, in addition to taking the medical clerical work off the hands of doctors. Due to the limitations of the law, it is not possible to put the data or processing related to the reception in the cloud, making it necessary to set up a server containing medical information at the medical institution. In the future, ShareMedical has plans to set up a BPO (business process outsourcing) center with qualified medical coding specialists and make it possible to respond by remote login. In fact, medical institutions and related facilities that participate in the above-mentioned network would not each have to have qualified individuals for medical affairs, so (even if they have medical equipment) they are not medical institutions with installed facilities, thus the birth of the “freelance house call specialists”.
This new business opportunity is convenient for doctors working in public hospitals and trainees that do not necessarily have a large income. In the daytime, they can work their day job at the university hospital or clinic, and at night they can adopt an on-call work style, so their degree of freedom is higher than doctors who work the night shift. A subsequent income is another merit. Because they are limiting the provision of services to only night visits, the risk of competing with the traditional medical institutions and practitioners in the market has also been minimized. This also eliminates the concern of being labeled a “threat” by the medical association and other stakeholders.
The mobile app under development Image credit: ShareMedical
A glance at companies in the field of smart house call services in the US includes Stat in Philadelphia, Heal in Los Angeles, and Pager in New York. At last month’s World Health Day, Uber announced UberHEALTH which allows users to conduct a diabetes examination and thyroid function test during a house call.
ShareMedical raised funds in December of 2015 from Slogan Coent (amount undisclosed), and in November of 2016 raised 50 million yen (about $440K US) from leading medical and nursing HR matching company Tsme.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
Tokyo-based Bonx, the Japanese startup developing a wearable walkie-talkie device under the same name, unveiled today its fundraising of 200 million yen (about $1.76 million) from Adways (TSE:2489), Keio Innovation Initiative and Japanese hearing aid manufacturer Rion (TSE:6823) as well as several unnamed individual investors. With the latest funding, the company has raised a total of 5 million yen (about $4.4 million) to date. They will use the funds to set up a US subsidiary for North American expansion while exploring technological synergies with the investors participating this time around. Bonx launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first market-ready product back in October of 2015, and subsequently unveiled the second generation called Bonx Grip in December of 2016. The new version sees many improvements in supporting usage environment such as water resistance and wearing comfort. Given that a recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities. Given the recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects…
Tokyo-based Bonx, the Japanese startup developing a wearable walkie-talkie device under the same name, unveiled today its fundraising of 200 million yen (about $1.76 million) from Adways (TSE:2489), Keio Innovation Initiative and Japanese hearing aid manufacturer Rion (TSE:6823) as well as several unnamed individual investors.
With the latest funding, the company has raised a total of 5 million yen (about $4.4 million) to date. They will use the funds to set up a US subsidiary for North American expansion while exploring technological synergies with the investors participating this time around.
Bonx launched a crowdfunding campaign for its first market-ready product back in October of 2015, and subsequently unveiled the second generation called Bonx Grip in December of 2016. The new version sees many improvements in supporting usage environment such as water resistance and wearing comfort.
Given that a recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities.
Given the recent increased coverage of 3G/4G connectivity in ski resorts or snowy landscapes around the globe, CEO Takahiro Miyasaka expects that more foreign outdoor go-ers will start using the Bonx device to communicate with each others during their leisure and sporting activities.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO). Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article. See also: Japan’s social news aggregator for press Spectee announces Asian, US expansion In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of…
Tokyo-based Spectee, the Japanese startup behind the artificial intelligence(AI)-powered platform offering news materials based on social media analytics, revealed on Monday that they have filed for two patents applications for automated creation of straight news stories to the Japan Patent Office (JPO).
Upon being granted the patents by JPO, the technologies related to the high precisioning / processing of image recognition and natural language analysis using deep learning, and collection of equivalents to the so-called Five Ws from an average of 4-5 social media posts make it possible to automatically generate straight news stories of about 300 characters. When incidents occur in urban areas and more than 10 posts are likely to be gathered in relation to it they can complete a sufficiently accurate article.
In the field of AI-powered news writing, in 2016 the Associated Press started using Automated Insights’ WordSmith to create news articles on sports scores and
made headlines. In Japan, Nagoya’s The Mid-Japan Economist, in collaboration with Datasection and Bit A, posted article created by AI; additionally, the Nikkei online edition worked together with the Institute of Language Understanding and Professor Yutaka Matsuo of the University of Tokyo to begin a Financial Summary service written by news bots. Even among Japanese startups, teams have been emerging to tackle the theme of automatically creating articles using AI.
Spectee was founded in February of 2014 (previously Euclid Lab), and it graduated in October 2015 from the 11th batch of Open Network Lab’s incubation program. In July of 2016, they raised an undisclosed sum of funds in a series A round from Fuji Startup Ventures and a Japanese surveillance camera company, as well as Mizuho Capital. The Spectee platform, which obtains the rights to content collected from social media and provides it as news material to the mass media and companies, has been adopted by about 100 media companies and publishers across Japan.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. A manufacturing startup from Nice, France and an Italian “diving computer” maker showcasing their products at an annual show targeting the diving market in Asia. Held at the Sunshine 60 Building in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward (from whence the current Tokyo Metropolitan Gov. Yuriko Koike hails), many overseas companies albeit mostly those involved in services such as resort operations took part in this event. The French firm Visit Seabed which at the last show announced its diver stability device last year (improved this year in terms of size and design) unveiled at the 2017 its new product – a world first – called Seabed Buggy which assists those divers exploring the shallower seabeds in a safer and stressless manner. Even those who may not have much stamina can now use this underwater vehicle to move about freely. According to the company, it took a few years to perfect this powered “board” since several designs were tried out and many patents required to realize those were filed. The final version enables divers to “scoot” near the seabed thanks to facilitated operations. As…
This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.
Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy
A manufacturing startup from Nice, France and an Italian “diving computer” maker showcasing their products at an annual show targeting the diving market in Asia. Held at the Sunshine 60 Building in Tokyo’s Toshima Ward (from whence the current Tokyo Metropolitan Gov. Yuriko Koike hails), many overseas companies albeit mostly those involved in services such as resort operations took part in this event.
Visit Seabed CEO Frederic Castellanet on the left Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy
The French firm Visit Seabed which at the last show announced its diver stability device last year (improved this year in terms of size and design) unveiled at the 2017 its new product – a world first – called Seabed Buggy which assists those divers exploring the shallower seabeds in a safer and stressless manner. Even those who may not have much stamina can now use this underwater vehicle to move about freely.
Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy
According to the company, it took a few years to perfect this powered “board” since several designs were tried out and many patents required to realize those were filed. The final version enables divers to “scoot” near the seabed thanks to facilitated operations. As an aside, it is understood that there are more activities in the offing for French Polynesia, being one of the potential Visit Seabed user space, as the local government is pushing for more resort developments.
Image credit: Ratio Computers
This year, the Italian company Ratio Computers were also conspicuous at the diving confab. The computer in this case is not the ones used to access the Internet but those used by divers to ensure that they have a handle on their underwater activities related to the amount of gas left in the tank (which needs to take into account the time required upon surfacing since a sudden rise would result in the bends and other ailments), depth and other vital information. (Speaking of Italy, it has of late been a hotbed of startup activities.)
It is thought that with the further spread of interest in underwater leisure as well as business such as aquatic environment use like water use (one novel project is outlined by “waterpolitan.com” although currently its focus does not cover the oceanic environment yet), Japan and Asia promises to become a fertile ground [sic!] for expanded use of diving equipment and devices.
Masaru Ikeda
The Bridge
