Kazuhiro Aoyagi, the founder and CEO of Ignition Point, announced the establishment of a startup fund called BlueGoats Capital today. The fund size is set to be 300 to 500 million yen (about $2.7 million to $4.5 million). It will offers 1 to 50 million yen (about $8,900 to $450,000) per investment in Japanese startups in their pre-seed or seed round. Additionally, it will also introduce Japanese large funds to foreign startups seeking series B funding and join the round as a minority investor. The firm targets so-called ‘XTech (cross-tech) Field’, which applies new technologies into conventional real businesses.
Obviously named after the founder’s name – Aoyagi consisting of Ao (blue) and Yagi (goats), the fund was also influenced by the English words of ‘Greatest of All Time’. He had been giving advice to entrepreneurs about incorporation or scaling-up of their business. In these processes, he has sometimes invested as an angel investor in some of them out of those like Synapse, the developer of the platform driving potential customers to online travel agencies. But he finally decided to expand his investment activity by forming the fund.
Ignition Point had found various kinds of business in a short period; the Secual smart security startup, the LEARNie online English conversation lesson for kids, the Pontely free DNA test for pet shop dogs, and the DANX on-demand eating and drinking service using food trucks. BlueGoats has no capital relationship with Ignition Point, but Aoyagi’s deep insight and experience about startups and business management will be surely shared with the firm’s portfolio companies.
BlueGoats Capital says that it may make Ignition Point’s office space Spark 2045 or the Point Edge creative studio in Shibuya available to the new fund’s portfolio companies.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. One Visa (formerly Residence), the Japanese startup that helps companies streamline visa management for their foreign employees, announced in a press conference held in Tokyo that it has partnered with Credit Saison (TSE:8253) and Fuji Xerox System Service. Credit Saison will issue credit cards for foreigners while Fuji Xerox System Service will work with government offices to offer pre-filled application forms for official documents. In the past, it was difficult for credit companies to obtain the latest information on the addresses and status of work of foreign national users, so there were problems in issuing credit cards to them. Through the collaboration with Credit Saison and by linking the visa information of One Visa users, companies using One Visa can detect when the foreign national user joins or leaves a company in real time as well as the latest information regarding visa renewals, the result being a smoother process for issuing a credit card. Additionally, with the support of Fuji Xerox System Service, One Visa will allow their users to get a pre-filled application for an official certificate by linking with the information from their visa application documents. The format of documents differs depending…
See the original story in Japanese.
One Visa (formerly Residence), the Japanese startup that helps companies streamline visa management for their foreign employees, announced in a press conference held in Tokyo that it has partnered with Credit Saison (TSE:8253) and Fuji Xerox System Service. Credit Saison will issue credit cards for foreigners while Fuji Xerox System Service will work with government offices to offer pre-filled application forms for official documents.
In the past, it was difficult for credit companies to obtain the latest information on the addresses and status of work of foreign national users, so there were problems in issuing credit cards to them. Through the collaboration with Credit Saison and by linking the visa information of One Visa users, companies using One Visa can detect when the foreign national user joins or leaves a company in real time as well as the latest information regarding visa renewals, the result being a smoother process for issuing a credit card.
Additionally, with the support of Fuji Xerox System Service, One Visa will allow their users to get a pre-filled application for an official certificate by linking with the information from their visa application documents. The format of documents differs depending on each local authority, but Fuji Xerox System Service is currently in the process of standardizing the format for the 23 wards in Tokyo and in Yokohama City where the population of foreign nationals is particularly large.
In preparation for the revision of the immigration control laws that will go into effect on April 1st and created the new “special skills” visa requiring Japanese language ability, the company created a Japanese learning environment called the One Visa Education Center. The first center was established in September of last year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and it is promoting a Japanese language learning business for overseas personnel in cooperation with Kansai University’s Ikeda Laboratory.
In partnership with Seven Bank in December of last year, the company established a system that makes it possible for foreign employees to obtain a bank account almost immediately upon arrival in Japan by linking it with their visa information. Previously this has taken upwards of six months post arrival. (This system will launch on April 1st with the introduction of the new residence status, but it will take some more time until the first user comes in.)
One Visa was initially launched as a service helping companies streamline visa acquisition and management for their immigrant employees. With the expansion of its service lineup to include education (One Visa Education), employment referral (One Visa Work), One Visa (visa acquisition and management), and One Visa Connect (living support), it will become possible to provide extensive support for foreign workers, from working to living or other every aspect of their whole lives.
Okamura himself has worked for the Tokyo Immigration Bureau in Shinagawa, Tokyo and had a hand in issuing visas for some 30,000 foreigners. More than 400 companies have introduced it since the beta launch in June 2017. The company graduated from the 4th batch of Recruit’s Tech Lab Paak accelerator, and came in 4th place at IVS 2017 Spring Kobe’s LaunchPad. In June of 2017 it raised 36 million yen (about $324,000 US) from Primal Capital and Skyland Ventures in a seed round.
Translated by Amanda Imaksaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based A.L.I. Technologies (formerly known as Aerial Lab Industries) gave the press a demonstration of the prototype of its hoverbike named Speeder today. This was the first tine to show the hoverbike capable of flying with a person while the company showcased a mock-up of it at press conference announcing the establishment of Drone Fund’s No.2 fund last year. Since the company thinks that it requires some time to realize a manned drone due to undeveloped legal system, it first aims the practical application of a hoverbike that can run on public roads floating in the air. They are currently in negotiation with tjhe Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism and the National Police Agency about the possible permission to ride a hoverbike with both a medium-sized motorcycle license and a drone license. The company also expects to ask purchasers of Speeder to get a lecture or training in advance at an authorized drone school for the consideration of safety. In the demonstration, they showed the hoverbike’s various functions working properly: altitude control by ultrasonic sensor, auto-attitude control by IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), buoyancy control by duct effect / ground effect as…
Tokyo-based A.L.I. Technologies (formerly known as Aerial Lab Industries) gave the press a demonstration of the prototype of its hoverbike named Speeder today. This was the first tine to show the hoverbike capable of flying with a person while the company showcased a mock-up of it at press conference announcing the establishment of Drone Fund’s No.2 fund last year.
Since the company thinks that it requires some time to realize a manned drone due to undeveloped legal system, it first aims the practical application of a hoverbike that can run on public roads floating in the air. They are currently in negotiation with tjhe Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism and the National Police Agency about the possible permission to ride a hoverbike with both a medium-sized motorcycle license and a drone license. The company also expects to ask purchasers of Speeder to get a lecture or training in advance at an authorized drone school for the consideration of safety.
In the demonstration, they showed the hoverbike’s various functions working properly: altitude control by ultrasonic sensor, auto-attitude control by IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), buoyancy control by duct effect / ground effect as well as braking system. This prototype mounts a generic but customized engine but the detailed specification including how much power output it has was not disclosed.
A.L.I. Technologies starts taking orders for Limited Edition of Speeder Standard Model (only 100 will be sold) in early May while the finished product will be delivered in the first half of 2021. The expected price is $80,000 to $120,000. No down payment of deposit is needed but the firm plans to conduct pre-purchase examination for purchasers including license possession status in order to prevent the abuse of the product.
A.L.I. Technologies also plans to produce Speeder Sports Model targeting high-end users (the expected price is $300,000 to $500,000), although the production volume is still to be fixed. As for the mass production type of Speeder following Limited Edition, it will work using electric motors without gasoline engine and propeller but the company has not disclosed about how they will make it float in the air. In the demonstration event, Shuhei Komatsu (Chirman, A.L.I. Technologies), Kotaro Chiba (General Partner, Drone Fund / Managing Director & Investor, A.L.I. Technologies ) and Soichiro Imaeda (member of the House of Representatives, Diet Members Caucus supporting Drone Business) celebrated the hoverbike has stepped into the new development phase.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Japanese telexistence robotics startup Gitai (formerly MacroSpace) announced today that it has appointed humanoid scientist/engineer and former Founder/CEO of Schaft Yuto Nakanishi as COO. Schaft was founded back in 2012 and subsequently secured funding from TomyK and Tsuneishi Partners. It won the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge trials in 2013, and was later acquired by Google (name at the time of acquisition). Since then, Schaft had been developing robots at a new technology development company called X (formerly Google X) operating under Google’s stock holding company Alphabet, but the Schaft project shut down in November of last year. Gitai was initially focused on the telexistence technology which connects an operator and a robot in two different locations. Since its participation in the 9th batch of the Tech Lab Paak accelerator in 2017, it appears the company has been trying to shift the business to the space sector. The cost of operating the International Space Station (ISS) tops several trillion yen or more worldwide, with Japan supplying several hundred billion yen or more of the cumulative total. Around half of the cost comes from training astronauts, their travel between the Earth…
Japanese telexistence robotics startup Gitai (formerly MacroSpace) announced today that it has appointed humanoid scientist/engineer and former Founder/CEO of Schaft Yuto Nakanishi as COO.
Gitai was initially focused on the telexistence technology which connects an operator and a robot in two different locations. Since its participation in the 9th batch of the Tech Lab Paak accelerator in 2017, it appears the company has been trying to shift the business to the space sector.
The cost of operating the International Space Station (ISS) tops several trillion yen or more worldwide, with Japan supplying several hundred billion yen or more of the cumulative total. Around half of the cost comes from training astronauts, their travel between the Earth and the ISS, and transporting the necessary items to maintain life on the ISS.
As astronauts are human, the amount of time spent performing tasks and the range of such activities are limited, and since we cannot ignore the effects of weightlessness and space radiation, astronauts who reach a certain period of time on their mission must return to Earth. Additionally, a variety of tests are conducted on the ISS; however, there are limits to carrying out these experiments in each field and all alone as each astronaut specializes in different fields.
If robots can be sent to the ISS and remotely controlled from Earth, it is possible to reduce the number of astronauts sent. If the ISS robot operators work in shifts, experts in all fields are able to carry out their experiments remotely, all day, every day. If robots can replace some of the extremely costful industries being employed, perhaps there is room to turn this into a business. It seems Sho Nakanose, Founder & CEO of Gitai, thought so.
With the Trump administration in the US announcing a policy shift in the operation of the ISS to the private sector (from NASA to space startups), the US has seen a remarkable increase in the momentum of space startups. Following the US movement to contribute 80% of the ISS operating costs, Japan is also looking for ways to cooperate with space startups through JAXA, one example being the ISS experimental module “Kibou”.
Nakanose says,
For example, let’s say that the ISS mission, which had cost 40 billion yen so far, has to be able to operate on 4 billion yen. In this case, even if a robot is a bit expensive, we can look at it as a cost reduction tool for the entire mission, so the robot’s cost would be acceptable. […]
It may still take awhile for robots to operate autonomously, but if we can provide telexistence with detailed, high-definition but low-latency video and operability, it should be valuable enough.
Whether it is robots for businesses, or robots for consumers, an overwhelming reduction in cost is needed to bring it to the level of mass production that could cope with the widespread use of robots. As a matter of fact, this is probably the reason behind X’s abandoning Schaft’s operations. In contrast, a robot using telexistence for space missions would be able to make enough money for startups to continue doing business for as long as there is a demand.
Nakanishi added,
The main focus for Google’s development of Schaft was to turn it into a business. Because we focused on how to do business with a bipedal robot, in order to do that we focused on the themes of low cost, low power consumption, and full autonomy. […]
Lower cost means that the profit rate for each robot is also lower, which makes mass production necessary, but it is still going to take time for a fully autonomous robot to reach the market. Google allowed me to do it for five years, and I feel like I took it as far as I could, but after reaching this conclusion I decided to move on.
Contrary to Nakanishi’s previous dealings in the world of cost consciousness, in the space robot market companies can make a profit by selling just one. Furthermore, since there is no requirement to be fully automatic from the beginning, Nakanishi judged Gitai as the place where he can make the most use of his knowledge as a humanoid engineer. According to him, the hardware and software for fully autonomous robots are still unable to keep up with the the abilities of humans and the speed of human movement.
Nakanishi continued,
As a robot researcher, if someone else is able to do this, I feel like I don’t want to admit it (laughs). But, if there is a place where you can accomplish what you want and get paid to do it, well, that’s the best. (If it’s not completely autonomous) Many people may place blame on it but you’d better ignore them (laughs). I want to produce a robot that can actually be used.
Nakanishi has been developing a robot that mimics the motions of the lower half of the human body at Schaft. But now he will work to produce a robot that produces movements as similar as possible to those of the upper human body at Gitai. The day when the technologies developed by the same humanoid scientist at different startups go on to be acquired by Google, uniting the upper and lower bodies in real life, may not be just a dream.
Gitai has enrolled several engineers from the Univesity of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Information Engineering, Nakanishi’s alma mater, such as CTO Toyotaka Kozuki (former mechanical engineer at Japanese personal mobility startup Whill) along with VP of Software Development Ryohei Ueda (formerly software engineer at Schaft). Gitai has transformed almost imperceptibly into an assembly point for some of the world’s top robotics authorities.
Gitai raised 15 million yen (about $134K US) from Skyland Ventures in a seed round in September 2016, and then raised $1.25 million US from ANRI and 500 Startups Japan (at that time) in a seed round in December 2017.
Translated by Amanda Imasaka Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based MedTech startup Buzzreach announced today that it has fundraised 50 million yen (about $450,000 US) in a seed round. This round was secured in December of 2018 and led by KLab Venture Partners. The amount includes loans from financial institutions. The company offers a matchmaking platform called Puzz between clinical trial patients and pharmaceutical companies as well as a media portal called ‘Smt‘. Buzzreach was founded by Takateru Inokawa (current CEO) and Kiyoshi Aoyagi (current COO), both of whom had been previously involved in the foundation of two patient recruit organizations: Clinical Trial and Croee. In the increased globalization of the pharmaceutical industry and their drug discovery business, more new drugs are becoming in need of getting approved by authorities in each country before coming to the markets. To seek approval for drugs, it is necessary to conduct tests called clinical trials. Clinical trials are roughly classified into three phases: phase I: Conducting a trial to evaluate drug’s safety and toxicity to healthy persons phase II: Conducting a trial to examine usage / dosage with a smaller number of patients phase III: Conducting trial to assess drug’s effectiveness comparing to conventional drugs in…
Tokyo-based MedTech startup Buzzreach announced today that it has fundraised 50 million yen (about $450,000 US) in a seed round. This round was secured in December of 2018 and led by KLab Venture Partners. The amount includes loans from financial institutions. The company offers a matchmaking platform called Puzz between clinical trial patients and pharmaceutical companies as well as a media portal called ‘Smt‘.
Buzzreach was founded by Takateru Inokawa (current CEO) and Kiyoshi Aoyagi (current COO), both of whom had been previously involved in the foundation of two patient recruit organizations: Clinical Trial and Croee.
In the increased globalization of the pharmaceutical industry and their drug discovery business, more new drugs are becoming in need of getting approved by authorities in each country before coming to the markets. To seek approval for drugs, it is necessary to conduct tests called clinical trials.
Clinical trials are roughly classified into three phases:
phase I: Conducting a trial to evaluate drug’s safety and toxicity to healthy persons
phase II: Conducting a trial to examine usage / dosage with a smaller number of patients
phase III: Conducting trial to assess drug’s effectiveness comparing to conventional drugs in a larger number of patients.
Out of all these phases, phase I trials are performed in a smaller group consisting of recruited subjects by giving compensation as we can occasionally see recruitment ads on job magazines. On the other hand, phase II and III trials must be performed in a larger group of patients with a specific disease.
This process in recruiting patients poses many difficulties. To participate a clinical trial for a new drug, patients are required to meet eligibility criteria set for each trial including health status or disease condition. Even if a patient meet the criteria, a pharmaceutical company would have to acquire the consent from the patient and cooperate with medical centers / clinics as well as principal investigators. If the pharmaceutical company could not have a sufficient number of patients, it would be forced to extend the period of the trial or increase the number of medical centers / clinics, which requires vast extra-budget before the application for marketing approval.
To solve these problems, Buzzreach has developed Puzz, the data management system of clinical trial subjects. Pharmaceutical companies, CRO (contract research organization) which monitors clinical trial process and SMO (site management organization) which owns data about medical centers / clinics capable of participating clinical trials are allowed to join Puzz and then can deliver clinical trial information to more than 2.5 million potential trial subjects, over 10 healthcare-related media outlets and 10 patient advocacy groups.
For subject candidates needing clinical trial information, Buzzreach offers a medical portal site called SMT, where users can search specific clinical trials with the criteria which their clinical condition and symptom meets. Although such information is also provided by Japic CTI (Japan Pharmaceutical Information Center), it is not so user-friendly; the website offers only smaller information only and no inquiry contact. SMT gives detailed information provided by pharmaceutical companies in addition to the quote from Japic CTI. By replying to questionnaires shown in search results, applicants can convey their intention to participate in a clinical trial to a pharmaceutical company.
Buzzreach makes money by charging fee to pharmaceutical companies using the platform on a monthly basis. The startup provides three pricing plans according to how many drug discovery pipelines the user company has or how much budget they have.
We have seldom seen KLab Venture Partners’ investment in a vertical SaaS (software as a service) startup. However, the VC firm may not help ignoring the existence of patients as consumers in the business model. Of course, such a service requires great care to handle information concerning users’ privacy, but Buzzreach has a great potential to create another value through the secondary use of such precious individual data.
Translated by Taijiro Takeda Edited by Masaru Ikeda
See the original story in Japanese. Four Years From Now (4YFN for short) is a startup showcase event in Barcelona, annually taking place along with globally known tech conference MWC (previously known as Mobile World Congress). Launched back in 2013 by distinguished Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi, the conference now attracts about 20,000 attendees every year. Some of our readers may recall that 7 Japanese startups jointly set up their Japanese Pavilion booths by paying expense by themselves at 4YFN last year in response to a massive effort by Tomohiro Hagiwara, CEO of Japanese startup Aquabit Spirals. But this year, they have successfully obtained a financial support from JETRO, the Japanese government-backed trade promotion organization, and as many as 20 startups and SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) from Japan attended the event as exhibitors and speakers this year. Exhibitors from Japan are Infinitegra (developing high sernsitive wearable camera), Mitsuya (plating electronic parts), Kotozna (offering multi-language translation service using social network and technology), George and Shaun (developing loss prevention devices and predicting dementia patients), Spiral (developing indoor-use drones), Techno Labo (case forming for IoT sample devices), Pisces (developing a virtual office room connecting remote workers using augmented reality technology)、pop…
Four Years From Now (4YFN for short) is a startup showcase event in Barcelona, annually taking place along with globally known tech conference MWC (previously known as Mobile World Congress). Launched back in 2013 by distinguished Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi, the conference now attracts about 20,000 attendees every year. Some of our readers may recall that 7 Japanese startups jointly set up their Japanese Pavilion booths by paying expense by themselves at 4YFN last year in response to a massive effort by Tomohiro Hagiwara, CEO of Japanese startup Aquabit Spirals. But this year, they have successfully obtained a financial support from JETRO, the Japanese government-backed trade promotion organization, and as many as 20 startups and SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) from Japan attended the event as exhibitors and speakers this year.
Exhibitors from Japan are Infinitegra (developing high sernsitive wearable camera), Mitsuya (plating electronic parts), Kotozna (offering multi-language translation service using social network and technology), George and Shaun (developing loss prevention devices and predicting dementia patients), Spiral (developing indoor-use drones), Techno Labo (case forming for IoT sample devices), Pisces (developing a virtual office room connecting remote workers using augmented reality technology)、pop inc (developing image analysis SDK for mobile)、Sigma-SAR (satellite data analysis), Trigence (developing high quality semiconductors for audio equipment), FUKUSHIMA Wheel (ad platform by displaying the LED on the bicycle rim), Aquabit Spirals (developing the Smart Plate device which enables bookmarking on real objects using NFC-enabled IC chips), Empath (identifying people’s emotion from vocal patterns in real-time regardless of language), Mobilous (offering the AppExe cloud for mobile app developers), PicoCELA (developing the multi-hop technology which enables users to install a wide-area local area network without cable), Vanguard Industries (IoT venture builder), Soinn (developing neural network for machine learning), and Mira Robotics (developing remotely-controlled robots delegating housekeeping chores).
Among all of them, Empath, FUKUSHIMA Wheel, George and Shaun, Kotozna, PicoCELA, pop inc, Aquabit Spirals, Techno Labo, and Tringence were invited to present onstage at Japan Innovation Showcase, the presentation session for Japanese startups at 4YFN where the venue for 200 people was all full with having some standing viewers. Compared to MWC where it’s harder to choose which exhibitors to check because of too many booths, more startups are concentrated in the 4YFN venue so that it’s more efficient for investors to look for good startups to invest in and for entrepreneurs to find enterprises in need of collaborating with startups. With the massive support from their government-backed startup support organizations, more than 100 companies from Korea and Taiwan were exhibiting at MWC and 4YFN, showing off more presence than local startups in Europe.
Hagiwara, who led the startup delegations to 4YFN this year, told us that his motivation for joining the event was triggered by meeting up with Visualead, the Israeli startup acquired by Alibaba in 2017.
The Visualead ream told me that seeking a way out of the country and making global expansion efforts to find the optimal market is not only fatal but also very normal for Israeli startups, which is contrast with Japan having a sufficient-sized market inside the country.
I think that even Japanese startups need to take the “Global First” approach rather than the “Global Expansion” one.
Since we’ve heard more startups and startup supporting organizations all across Japan are uniting with each other in this movement, more teams are expected to join the delegations and exhibit next year.