Tokyo-based SkyDrive, the Japanese drone startup spun off from the Cartivator volunteer group consisting of aircraft, drone and automotive engineers, announced on Friday that it has secured 3.9 billion yen (about $36.8 million US) in a series B round. Participating investors in this round are:
Development Bank of Japan
Itochu (TSE:8001)
Itochu Technology Ventures
Eneos Innovation Partners
Obayashi Corporation (TSE:1802)
Energy & Environment Investment
Strive
NEC (TSE:6701)
Veriserve
Sumitomo Mitsui Finance and Leasing
For SkyDrive, this follows their series A round back in September of 2019. Among the investors participating in the latest round, Itochu Technology Ventures, Energy & Environment Investment, and Strive participated in the previous round. Since its seed round back in November of 2018, the company has raised a total of 5.7 billion yen (about 53.8 million US) to date.
SkyDrive’s so-called “flying car” is an electrically-powered, vertical take-off and landing pilotless aircraft. As a new trend in the mobility industry, the drone is expected to be used for taxi service in cities, means for transportation in remote islands and mountainous areas, emergency transport in the event of a diaster. Compared to conventional air crafts, the drone is cost-effective, makes lower noise but requires a smaller space for take-off and landing.
Along with the announcement of the funding, SkyDrive has also announced that it has successfully conducted a four-minute public manned flight test at a test field in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, using its newly developed manned SD-03 aircraft. The company plans to continue to develop even safer and more secure technology by conducting further flight tests under a wider range of conditions based on the results.
SkyDrive hopes to have the SD-03 approved for flight by the end of this year and turn the prototype into a commercial model by 2023. The company is also developing another concept model, the SD-XX, which is said to be capable of flying at a maximum altitude of 500 meters, 100 kilometers per hour, and a range of 19 kilometers.
Tokyo-based Studist announced today that it has partnered with NTT Docomo Asia to expand the former’s TeachMe Biz visual workflow management platform in Singapore and other Asia pacific regions. In Singapore, the Circuit Breaker measure has been forcing people to stay home for working and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Studist wants to help companies digitize their employee training and adot e-learning programs through the platform. Founded in March of 2010, Studist learned about 90% of all jobs in the world do not rely on qualifications, experience, or sensory knowledge through a survey, which let them decide to develop the platform. Its official version was launched back in late 2012 September of 2013. The company has raised over $12 million US in total, including a series C round back in April of last year. At that time, the company said it would focus on strengthening marketing, targeting sales boost in Southeast Asia, integrating APIs with other various cloud-based platforms in addition to upgrading the platform into the one for managing standard operating procedures. The company has already set up a Thai subsidiary which are expanding sales to Thai companies in addition to having started serving the platform in Malaysia in…
Tokyo-based Studist announced today that it has partnered with NTT Docomo Asia to expand the former’s TeachMe Biz visual workflow management platform in Singapore and other Asia pacific regions. In Singapore, the Circuit Breaker measure has been forcing people to stay home for working and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Studist wants to help companies digitize their employee training and adot e-learning programs through the platform.
Founded in March of 2010, Studist learned about 90% of all jobs in the world do not rely on qualifications, experience, or sensory knowledge through a survey, which let them decide to develop the platform. Its official version was launched back in late 2012September of 2013. The company has raised over $12 million US in total, including a series C round back in April of last year. At that time, the company said it would focus on strengthening marketing, targeting sales boost in Southeast Asia, integrating APIs with other various cloud-based platforms in addition to upgrading the platform into the one for managing standard operating procedures.
The company has already set up a Thai subsidiary which are expanding sales to Thai companies in addition to having started serving the platform in Malaysia in partnership with TK International, a local IT service provider in Kuala Lumpur. Leveraging the partnership with Docomo Asia, Studist wants to boost the sales in Singapore and APAC to help companies in these regions solve their challenges over human resource development.
The platform is serving 2,600 companies in Japan (as of February 2020) and 66 companies in ASEAN countries as of today. The company aims to introduce it to 100 companies by the end of February 2021.
Kumamoto-based Daiz, the Japanese startup developing plant-based substitutes for meat products, announced today that it is offering The Good Burger using the company’s proprietary meat alternative as a patty at all stores of the Freshness Burger fast-food restaurant chain all across Japan. The Good Burger has been offered at selected stores in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area on a trial basis since the middle of this month. In the burger, a patty made from soybeans is smothered in teriyaki sauce and sandwiched with low-carb buns and vegetables. Freshness Burger, the fast-food brand operated by Japanese restaurant chain giant Colowide (TSE:7616), has 183 locations nationwide and is ranked in the sixth place in Japan by number of outlets. The new product will be available from September 1 through the end of the month exclusively to Freshness Burger app members, and will be available to all customers after October 1. DAIZ adopts the patented Ochiai method in germinating soybeans, which activates enzymes and increases the amount of free amino acid contained by imparting stress such as lower oxygen level and higher temperature at the right timing of germination. This eventually contributes to bringing out the flavor of the raw ingredients and reproducing the…
The Good Burger ordered at Jiyugaoka store, the Freshness Burger fast-food chain restaurant. Image credit: Masaru Ikeda
Kumamoto-based Daiz, the Japanese startup developing plant-based substitutes for meat products, announced today that it is offering The Good Burger using the company’s proprietary meat alternative as a patty at all stores of the Freshness Burger fast-food restaurant chain all across Japan.
Freshness Burger, the fast-food brand operated by Japanese restaurant chain giant Colowide (TSE:7616), has 183 locations nationwide and is ranked in the sixth place in Japan by number of outlets. The new product will be available from September 1 through the end of the month exclusively to Freshness Burger app members, and will be available to all customers after October 1.
DAIZ adopts the patented Ochiai method in germinating soybeans, which activates enzymes and increases the amount of free amino acid contained by imparting stress such as lower oxygen level and higher temperature at the right timing of germination. This eventually contributes to bringing out the flavor of the raw ingredients and reproducing the meat-like texture without adding any additives.
In May, the company secured about $6 million US in a series A round, which brought the total sum of funding to date up to about $11.4 million US.
See the original story in Japanese. Fukuoka-based Medmain, the Japanese MedTech startup behind the PidPort telepathology solutions and the Medteria cloud for medical students, announced on Monday that it has secured 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million US) through the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that Hike Ventures has set up for this round. The company has not mentioned the stage of the rounud but it’s believed as a series A round. The latest round follows the 100 million yen funding back in August 2018, and brought the total sum of funding to date up to 1.2 billion yen (about 11.3 million US). Participating investors in this round are Fukuoka Wajiro Hospital Group, IHW Group from International University of Health and Welfare (IUHW), QTnet, Hike Ventures, Innovations and Future Creation, Deepcore, Dogan Beta as well as unnamed angel investors. Deepcore and Dogan Beta participated in the previous round. SPVs have advantages for startups, including lowering the time and effort required to raise funds, and some of our readers may recall that Japanese HRTech startup SmartHR used this scheme for their Series B round. Medmain said it adopted the scheme this time to streamline raising a large sum of funding from multiple…
The Medmain team, CEO Osamu Iizuka stands on the center. Image credit: Medmain
Fukuoka-based Medmain, the Japanese MedTech startup behind the PidPort telepathology solutions and the Medteria cloud for medical students, announced on Monday that it has secured 1.1 billion yen (about $10 million US) through the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that Hike Ventures has set up for this round. The company has not mentioned the stage of the rounud but it’s believed as a series A round. The latest round follows the 100 million yen funding back in August 2018, and brought the total sum of funding to date up to 1.2 billion yen (about 11.3 million US).
Participating investors in this round are Fukuoka Wajiro
Hospital Group, IHW Group from International University of Health and
Welfare (IUHW), QTnet, Hike Ventures, Innovations and Future Creation,
Deepcore, Dogan Beta as well as unnamed angel investors. Deepcore and
Dogan Beta participated in the previous round.
SPVs have advantages for startups, including lowering the time and effort required to raise funds, and some of our readers may recall that Japanese HRTech startup SmartHR used this scheme for their Series B round. Medmain said it adopted the scheme this time to streamline raising a large sum of funding from multiple investors including hospital managements.
The Fukuoka Wajiro Hospital Group has 24 medical institutions and seven medical education institutions in Japan, while the IHW Group from IUHW is made of medical, educational, and welfare groups with about 60 facilities nationwide. With the participation of these groups, the company intends to accelerate product development involving the clinical environment.
In partnership
with the Kyushu University School of Medicine and Kyushu University
Hospital, the company has been using supercomputers to conduct
high-speed learning for artificial intelligence (AI). Launching the
alpha version back in winter in 2018 followed by the official version in
February this year, it is conducting joint research with over 50
medical institutions in Japan.
Medical care and computer vision are considered to be a good match. Among many medical applications (e.g., radiological and endoscopic images), the company has chosen pathology as a focus because it believed this area was particularly behind in digitalization. In pathology, a doctor takes tissue samples from a patient’s body and a pathologist uses a microscope to check them. Medmain provides pathologists with an environment so that they can remotely complete this process by checking scanned images. In addition, the more images and learning data are collected, the more precise diagnosis the platform can provide. This may contribute to solving the delay in diagnosis due to the shortage of pathologists.
PidPort viewer’s image Image credit: Medmain
Because of the restrictions of medical-related laws, PidPort is used only on a research basis at this point in Japan, but it is used for actual medical diagnosis in other countries. In countries and regions where pathologists are scarce, pathologists in Japan have provided consultation and advice to a local doctor based on images of the latter’s patient’s tissue using the platform.
In addition, the spread of the novel coronavirus has restricted the movement people including even pathologists, but the platform allows pathologists to make diagnoses online without traveling multiple hospitals, which becomes a good opportunity to advance digital pathology.
Medmain plans to use the funds to enhance its AI algorithms, investing in image scanning equipment in addition to hiring talents for global business expansion effort. In Japan, the AI-powered diagnostic function is currently limited to research use due to legal restrictions, so the company will highlight the potential of remote pathological diagnosis leveraged by digital scanning and cloud storage functions for domestic sales.
Some of our readers may recall that Tokyo-based Atrae (TSE:6194) has introduced a mobile app called Yenta, an AI-powered professional matching app leveraging the Tinder-like Swipe UI (user interface). It was revealed today that the company has just launched the global edition ( iOS / Android ) and chosen India as the first destination of their global expansion effort. The app helps users connect with businesspersons upon widening their network through profile registration and repeated swipes on a screen. It recommends 10 persons the user may be interested in connecting with at noon daily. After choosing which persons the user wants to meet by swiping on it, the matching result with other users will be sent out later at 8pm on the same day. When both users confirm to meet (or e-meet) each other, they can start chatting via the app to make an appointment. The latest version of the app allows even Japanese users to have their English profile so that they can connect with Indian users. We have learned that the app has contributed to helping users build significant business relationships such as Japanese factoring startup Olta’s CEO having found his CSO as co-founder in addition to Japanese…
Some of our readers may recall that Tokyo-based Atrae (TSE:6194) has introduced a mobile app called Yenta, an AI-powered professional matching app leveraging the Tinder-like Swipe UI (user interface). It was revealed today that the company has just launched the global edition ( iOS / Android ) and chosen India as the first destination of their global expansion effort.
The app helps users connect with businesspersons upon widening their network through profile registration and repeated swipes on a screen. It recommends 10 persons the user may be interested in connecting with at noon daily. After choosing which persons the user wants to meet by swiping on it, the matching result with other users will be sent out later at 8pm on the same day. When both users confirm to meet (or e-meet) each other, they can start chatting via the app to make an appointment.
The latest version of the app allows even Japanese users to have their English profile so that they can connect with Indian users. We have learned that the app has contributed to helping users build significant business relationships such as Japanese factoring startup Olta’s CEO having found his CSO as co-founder in addition to Japanese satellite antenna-sharing startup Infostellar having succeeded in finding a new seed investor through it.
Since its launch back in 2016, the Yenta has not disclosed the size of its user base but it is estimated about hundreds of thousand of users in Japan. The company revealed that it has connected users each other over 3 million times to date.
To promote the India expansion, Atrae announced that it is hosting a data analysis competition in partnership with Tokyo-based DataGateway which boasts a local community of more than 20,000 data scientists in India. Based on the Open Innovation approach, the competition is aimed to encourage them to invent a new algorithm to create better matchmaking experience in the app. The competition winner can get 10,000 US dollars as a prize.
As for business matching apps with the Tinder-like swipe UI in the English-speaking market, New York/Paris-based Shapr, launched by a French entrepreneur, has secured US$16.5 million through a total of four rounds with over 2.5 million users as of May 2019 (according to The Independent’s sponsored article). In 2018, Tinder’s founders launched an app called Ripple with the back of the dating app’s parent company Match Group, but it is believed to be already in the deadpool given various situation.
Bangkok-based TalentEx, offering recruitment-focused online media and SaaS (software as a service) for human resource affairs, unveiled on Sunday that its Russian subsidiary has launched an online school business called CyberSamurai (КиберСамурае in Russian). The monthly subscription-based class is intended for Russian-speaking IT developers and engineers, helping them keep updated with IT industry and technology updates as well as business practices from Japan. It may also aim to allow them to enjoy commentary on Japanese anime and subculture in addition to giving them opportunities to e-meet up with CTOs from Japanese companies. TalentEx was launched back in 2013 by Yojiro Koshi who previously worked for Japanese ad network startup Nobot (Nobot was acquired by Japanese telco giant KDDI’s subsdiary Mediba in 2011). The company has several core businesses: the Wakuwaku online and offline recruiting service to find Japanese-speaking talents in Thailand, community management at the Monstar Hub Bangkok co-working space, and sales and marketing of the Michiru RPA software for Japanese companies in Thailand. See also: Meet Japanese entrepreneur trying to disrupt Thai recruitment market In July of 2018, the company founded a local subsidiary in Russia for a new project supplying Russian IT engineers to Japanese companies. After a…
Anatoli Kolbinov (left up), Dasha An (right up), and Ryosei Suginaka (left down) speak during the opening event on Sunday. All these TalentEx members can speak more than two languages including Japanese and Russian.
Bangkok-based TalentEx, offering recruitment-focused online media and SaaS (software as a service) for human resource affairs, unveiled on Sunday that its Russian subsidiary has launched an online school business called CyberSamurai (КиберСамурае in Russian). The monthly subscription-based class is intended for Russian-speaking IT developers and engineers, helping them keep updated with IT industry and technology updates as well as business practices from Japan. It may also aim to allow them to enjoy commentary on Japanese anime and subculture in addition to giving them opportunities to e-meet up with CTOs from Japanese companies.
TalentEx was launched back in 2013 by Yojiro Koshi who previously worked for Japanese ad network startup Nobot (Nobot was acquired by Japanese telco giant KDDI’s subsdiary Mediba in 2011). The company has several core businesses: the Wakuwaku online and offline recruiting service to find Japanese-speaking talents in Thailand, community management at the Monstar Hub Bangkok co-working space, and sales and marketing of the Michiru RPA software for Japanese companies in Thailand.
In July of 2018, the company founded a local subsidiary in Russia for a new project supplying Russian IT engineers to Japanese companies. After a little more than a year after its launch, the Russian business had been outpacing other businesses in Thailand in terms of revenue, but the recent coronavirus pandemic has halted it. After several months of their efforts to keep the Russian operation alive leveraging the sales from their Thai business, their Russian team of young members decided to launch a new business called CyberSamurai at this time.
The service’s mascot looks like a fox but they told us it is modeled after Masaru, renowned Russian figure skater Alina Zagitova’s Japanese dog. Image credit: TalentEx
Many startup businesses use a model that makes money by bridging the gap between the two sides of the transaction, such as information asymmetry and arbitrage. That’s something TalentEx is good at because of having presence in four markets – Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Russia. Coming up with moving talent from market to market, we may think the biggest challenge is language gap. According to Koshi, however, he turned to recognize that’s not true while work from home is more common in a huge country like Russia in addition to the fact that such a working style is becoming the global norm due to the pandemic.
When a Japanese company hires a Russian engineer, language gap is certainly a concern at first. Recently, however, these companies have been forced to shift to work from home, job instructions and other communication among colleagues are now often done through Slack and other online tools.
Koshi continued.
With more communication using tools than face-to-face meetings, the language barrier has been lowered for foreigners than in the past. In fact, we need to more focus on the cultural gap that cannot be fully verbalized but is often seen in business practices and work processes, which is more important when working with a Japanese company.
CyberSamurai’s Telegram group
Many of my foreign friends have
learned the Japanese language as a result of watching Japanese TV drama
series and anime titles in their country. Japanese anime was also a
source of inspiration for Hong Kong Democracy Movement stalwart Agnes
Chow to learn Japanese. Perhaps what makes her so popular in Japan may
be our perception that she deeply understands Japanese culture and
social customs rather than just her ability speaking the language.
That’s
why the service is not just about language learning but rather giving
opportunities to learn industry trends and subculture commentary which
are not directly related to business operations or professional
activities. The company charges membership fee but it may be hard for
them to see significant revenue with the new business alone compared to
their past human resources business in Russia. Perhaps the company sees
the member base as kinda talent pool for the time when the demand of
Japanese companies hiring Russian engineers recovers after the pandemic
settle down.
Run by TalentEx’s team of a few young Japanese and
Russian members in Russia, the service is wow focused on community
building using Telegram which is one of the most popular messaging apps
in the country. Going forward, they are expanding into other
Russian-speaking markets including former CIS countries.
The Bridge
Masaru Ikeda
