Tokyo-based Yoriso, the Japanese startup previously known as Minrebi that connects bereaved families to funeral homes and other end-of-life service providers, announced today that it has raised 2 billion yen (about $18.8 million) from SBI Investment, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment, Shinsei Corporate Investment, Nanto Bank, Yamaguchi Capital, and AG Capital.
This follows their series B round back in August of 2015 (securing 285 million yen = $2.3 million US) and series C round back in August of 2017 (securing 1 billion yen = $9 million US). All these bring the startup’s total funding raised so far to about 3.26 billion yen (about $30.7 million US).
Since its launch back in 2009, Yoriso has been offering funeral home reviews and pricing information online aimed at bringing more transparency into funeral planning. In 2015, the company launched a new service on Amazon, accepting orders for sending Buddhist monks for memorial services.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Active Sonar, the startup behind luxury brand consignment app Reclo, announced on Thursday that it has raised 3.6 billion yen (about $33.8 million US) from CITIC Capital, SBI Investment, and SBI Securities with loans from Mizuho Bank. Using the funds, the company will strengthen its China expansion. CITIC Capital is the asset management arm of Chinese largest financial conglomerate CITIC Group. Other details, such as the investment ratio of each investor and market cap, payment dates, were not diclosed. When you have a luxury brand item which is no longer needed, the Reclo platform allows you to ask experts for the appropriate value and price to sell it online. The platform will handle all other time-consuming processes such as selling the item, receiving payments from and shipping to the buyer so that all you have to do is just send the item to the platform. If you are not satisfied with the expert’s assessment, the platform would send you back your item for free. Unlike typical auction platforms or flea market apps, Reclo is not a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace and can prevent users from buying knock-off items which is often seen in the…
Tokyo-based Active Sonar, the startup behind luxury brand consignment app Reclo, announced on Thursday that it has raised 3.6 billion yen (about $33.8 million US) from CITIC Capital, SBI Investment, and SBI Securities with loans from Mizuho Bank. Using the funds, the company will strengthen its China expansion. CITIC Capital is the asset management arm of Chinese largest financial conglomerate CITIC Group. Other details, such as the investment ratio of each investor and market cap, payment dates, were not diclosed.
When you have a luxury brand item which is no longer needed, the Reclo platform allows you to ask experts for the appropriate value and price to sell it online. The platform will handle all other time-consuming processes such as selling the item, receiving payments from and shipping to the buyer so that all you have to do is just send the item to the platform.
Reclo’s Chinese version on Taobao
If you are not satisfied with the expert’s assessment, the platform would send you back your item for free. Unlike typical auction platforms or flea market apps, Reclo is not a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketplace and can prevent users from buying knock-off items which is often seen in the luxury second-hand market.
The company started the platform’s Chinese version last year, which greatly contributed to the growth of the transactions and doubling the company’s overall sales compared to last year. In addition, over half of the total transactions comes from outside Japan, with China accounting for 70%. With the further business expansion in China, the company set up a local subsidiary in Shanghai last year, planning to curating luxury items in addition to the consignment sales business.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Gitai, the Japanese telexistance robotics startup for the space industry, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $4.1 million US in a series A round. The round is led by Spiral Ventures Japan with participation from DBJ Capital (the investment arm of the Japanese government-backed Development Bank of Japan), Japanese electric power development company J-Power, 500 Startups Japan (now known as Coral Capital). Among these investors, 500 Startups Japan follows their previous investment in the latter’s seed round (securing $1.25 million US) back in 2017. This brings the startup’s total funding to date up to over 600 million yen (over $5.6 million US) but it may reach up to 1 billion yen (about $9.4 million) by additional funding within this year since the current round is not yet closed. Gitai plans to use the funding to develop autonomous space robots which may replace astronauts in their missions as well as launching a vehicle carrying robots to the International Space Station which is scheduled in late 2020. Gitai was initially focused on the telexistence technology which connects an operator and a robot in two different locations, but later shifted its primary business to serving…
Tokyo-based Gitai, the Japanese telexistance robotics startup for the space industry, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $4.1 million US in a series A round. The round is led by Spiral Ventures Japan with participation from DBJ Capital (the investment arm of the Japanese government-backed Development Bank of Japan), Japanese electric power development company J-Power, 500 Startups Japan (now known as Coral Capital).
Among these investors, 500 Startups Japan follows their previous investment in the latter’s seed round (securing $1.25 million US) back in 2017. This brings the startup’s total funding to date up to over 600 million yen (over $5.6 million US) but it may reach up to 1 billion yen (about $9.4 million) by additional funding within this year since the current round is not yet closed.
Gitai plans to use the funding to develop autonomous space robots which may replace astronauts in their missions as well as launching a vehicle carrying robots to the International Space Station which is scheduled in late 2020.
Gitai was initially focused on the telexistence technology which connects an operator and a robot in two different locations, but later shifted its primary business to serving the space industry back in 2017. Earlier this year, the company announced it has appointed Yuto Nakanishi as COO. Nakanishi is a humanoid scientist/engineer and former CEO of Schaft, the Japanese robotics startup acquired by Google.
See the original story in Japanese. Manila-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for its PopSlide mobile rewards platform, announced on Monday that it has officially launched a micro influencer platform called PopStar. Since its quiet launch in a stealth mode back in July of last year, the platform has acquired more than 200,000 micro influencers in the Philippines and Indonesia, boasting an accumulated total of 300 million consumers following the influencers as the number of the platform’s marketing reach. The number of their influencers registered is ranked on the top in all across the Asian market where influencer marketing is specifically trending. As a reason why the company can attract such a huge number of influencers, Yoyo Holdings founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada pointed out they could leverage the PopSlide app which helped them reduce the marketing cost for acquiring influencers for PopStar as well as having built a system that allows them to easily manage the entire process from managing influencers to measuring campaign performances. Fukada also told us the story behind why Popstar was launched: Under the mission of allowing people to use mobile internet for free of charge, Yoyo was founded and then launched apps like PopSlide…
PopStar hosted a party in Manila in July, celebrated its 1st anniversary with about 100 influencers. Image credit: Yoyo Holdings
Manila-based Yoyo Holdings, the startup known for its PopSlide mobile rewards platform, announced on Monday that it has officially launched a micro influencer platform called PopStar. Since its quiet launch in a stealth mode back in July of last year, the platform has acquired more than 200,000 micro influencers in the Philippines and Indonesia, boasting an accumulated total of 300 million consumers following the influencers as the number of the platform’s marketing reach.
The number of their influencers registered is ranked on the top in all across the Asian market where influencer marketing is specifically trending. As a reason why the company can attract such a huge number of influencers, Yoyo Holdings founder and CEO Yosuke Fukada pointed out they could leverage the PopSlide app which helped them reduce the marketing cost for acquiring influencers for PopStar as well as having built a system that allows them to easily manage the entire process from managing influencers to measuring campaign performances.
Fukada also told us the story behind why Popstar was launched:
Under the mission of allowing people to use mobile internet for free of charge, Yoyo was founded and then launched apps like PopSlide and Candy. However, marketing condition have been changed a lot since our foundation seven years ago. Now that we see everyone using Ineternet and data charge cost has significantly dropped down.
In our team, we’ve been discussing how we can keep creating values to the society with PopSlide and Candy only. How can we make more impact? How can we create a service that bring people beyond Internet? Such thought inspired us to invent PopStar.
The “Online Audition” function encourages influencers to submit their sample for a tryout. Image credit: Yoyo Holdings (Image is partially modified.)
Yoyo has built a platform that helps them easily find influencers who are likely to better reach the appropriate target audience according to the subject of their clients in addition to encouraging these influencers to submit their sample for a tryout. Also, the platform’s dashboard can facilitate everything needed for influence marketing, including managing campaigns, creating performance reports for clients, invoicing to clients, and paying rewards to influencers. Leveraging all this, Yoyo claims that all campaign placements can be managed by just a few people in charge.
PopStar clients are vary from crypto exchange, credit card issuer, major drug store chain, underwear brand, to operator of children’s playground. With a variety of influencers, the platform can deal with many different types of products and services which requires it to reach a huge variety of audience.
Image credit: Yoyo Holdings
Fukada added:
PopSlide, the mobile rewards platform we’ve been offering since several years ago, is also boasting a high user retention rate. We cannot disclose exact numbers but I think it must be higher than that of typical popular mobile game titles. Wondering one of the reasons why PopStar is going well is we are a product company and are good at making products.
In contrast to celebrities’ push into leveraging digital media such as YouTube marketing effort, the micro influencer segment is still behind in visualizing its components because influencers can also a long-tail in the whole marketing industry.
If they can achieve a data-driven approach and performance improvement through systemization, there would get a huge business opportunity. Yoyo claims that they want to become the top player in this sector by 2020. Fukada didn’t mention whether a regional or global top but that probably means the global one.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Giftee, the Japanese startup behind the platform allowing users to send friends an e-voucher which they can then redeem at selected retailers, announced on Friday that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 20 September with plans to offer 800,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 658,000 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 3.59 million shares. Nomura Securities will lead the underwriting. Its share price range will be released on 30 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 3 September and pricing on 9 September. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 1.12 billion yen (about $10.5 million) with an ordinary profit of 283 million yen ($2.7 million). Given that the tentative share price will be set at 1,250 yen and the company has issued a total of 24.03 million shares to date, their market cap is expected to be around 31 billion yen ($290 million). Founded in October of 2008, Giftee started the social gifting platform under the same name back in March of 2011. Subsequently the…
In addition to its home turf of Japan, Giftee’s eGift system is now available in Malaysia. Image credit: Giftee
Tokyo-based Giftee, the Japanese startup behind the platform allowing users to send friends an e-voucher which they can then redeem at selected retailers, announced on Friday that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 20 September with plans to offer 800,000 shares for public subscription and to sell 658,000 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 3.59 million shares. Nomura Securities will lead the underwriting.
Its share price range will be released on 30 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 3 September and pricing on 9 September. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 1.12 billion yen (about $10.5 million) with an ordinary profit of 283 million yen ($2.7 million). Given that the tentative share price will be set at 1,250 yen and the company has issued a total of 24.03 million shares to date, their market cap is expected to be around 31 billion yen ($290 million).
Founded in October of 2008, Giftee started the social gifting platform under the same name back in March of 2011. Subsequently the company launched a B2B service called Giftee for Business back in April of 2016, which allows companies to send an e-voucher to their clients and now accounts for 62% of the total revenue. They formed a capital and business tie-up with Japanese credit card giant JCB and department store operator Marui Group.
Gifttee had attracted a total of 1.1 million users with its original consumer-focused service since its launch to December of 2018, which eventually reached 1.25 million users back in June this year. Led by founder and CEO Mutsumi Ota (20.46%), the company’s major shareholders include telco giant KDDI (15.46%) and VC firm Jafco (15.05%).
Kobe-headquartered Chatwork, the startup behind a cloud-based business chat tool under the same name, announced on Thursday that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 24 September with plans to offer 600,000 shares for public subscription and to sell up to 1,270,500 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 7.9 million shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting. Its share price range will be released on 29 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 2 September and pricing on 6 September. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 1.31 billion yen (about $12.3 million) with an ordinary loss of 186 million yen ($1.75 million) and a net loss of 110 million yen ($1.04 million). Chatwork, the company’s flagship service, is now being served to 2,747,000 users while 364,000 paying users among them are subscribing to its premium service (as of June this year). In addition, the company also sells antivirus products of Slovakian IT security company ESET. Founded in July of 2000 as EC Studio, the company raised 300 million yen (about $2.5 million) from GMO Venture…
Image credit: Chatwork
Kobe-headquartered Chatwork, the startup behind a cloud-based business chat tool under the same name, announced on Thursday that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 24 September with plans to offer 600,000 shares for public subscription and to sell up to 1,270,500 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 7.9 million shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting.
Its share price range will be released on 29 August with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 2 September and pricing on 6 September. According to the consolidated statement as of December 2018, they posted revenue of 1.31 billion yen (about $12.3 million) with an ordinary loss of 186 million yen ($1.75 million) and a net loss of 110 million yen ($1.04 million).
Image credit: Chatwork
Chatwork, the company’s flagship service, is now being served to 2,747,000 users while 364,000 paying users among them are subscribing to its premium service (as of June this year). In addition, the company also sells antivirus products of Slovakian IT security company ESET.
Masaru Ikeda
Takeshi Hirano
The Bridge
