Tokyo-based payments startup Opn (formerly Omise, formerly Synqa) just announced that it has acquired acquired MerchaneE, the startup running the same business based out of Georgia, US. The deal is reportedly worth 50 billion yen (about $360 million). Nikkei says this is one of the largest acquisitions of a foreign company by a Japanese startup. While Opn has many clients in Japan and Southeast Asia, it aims to expand into the US and Europe with the acquisition. This will make Opn’s client base, including MerchantE, reach over 20,000 clients and help them hit over US$19 billion in total payment processing.
Opn (formerly Omise, formerly Synqa) was founded in 2013 by CEO Jun Hasegawa and COO Ezra Don Harinsut. The company secured $120 million US in a Series C+ round in May, which made them become Japan’s 5th unicorn (excluding those which have already made exit). Their clients include Toyota Motor and Thai duty-free giant King Power. The company claims that it serves more than 7,000 merchants, mainly in Japan and Southeast Asia, including McDonald’s and Toyota Motor.
Singapore-based AI Communis, the startup behind the platform integrating speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, announced on Monday that it has raised $1.3 million US in a seed round. Participating investors include UTokyo Innovation Platform (UTokyo IPC), DG Incubation, The Seed in addition to several unnamed angel investors. This follows their extended angel round back in April when The Seed previously invested in the company. The latest round brought their funding sum up to $2.1 million US. AI Communis was founded in April of 2020 by Nobuhiko Suzuki, who has been dealing with the business of translating, adding subtitles, and editing video clips. These multilingulization processes, especially needed for global marketing, had been handled manually for a long time, but the significantly improved accuracy of automation tools such as Amazon Transcribe, DeepL, Google Translate has recently made it possible to be mostly automated. The company launched a web app called Auris last year, which allows users to handle a series of tasks such as translation, subtitling, and video editing in a cloud environment. It currently supports 16 languages spoken across the Asian region, and has 87,000 users from 110 countries as of this month. Leveraging the app, the company…
Singapore-based AI Communis, the startup behind the platform integrating speech recognition and natural language processing technologies, announced on Monday that it has raised $1.3 million US in a seed round. Participating investors include UTokyo Innovation Platform (UTokyo IPC), DG Incubation, The Seed in addition to several unnamed angel investors. This follows their extended angel round back in April when The Seed previously invested in the company. The latest round brought their funding sum up to $2.1 million US.
AI Communis was founded in
April of 2020 by Nobuhiko Suzuki, who has been dealing with the business
of translating, adding subtitles, and editing video clips. These
multilingulization processes, especially needed for global marketing,
had been handled manually for a long time, but the significantly
improved accuracy of automation tools such as Amazon Transcribe, DeepL,
Google Translate has recently made it possible to be mostly automated.
The company launched a web app called Auris last year, which allows users to handle a series of tasks such as translation, subtitling, and video editing in a cloud environment. It currently supports 16 languages spoken across the Asian region, and has 87,000 users from 110 countries as of this month. Leveraging the app, the company launched a new business where crowdsourced gig workers help influencers and company marketers turn their video clips into any of these different languages.
With
the academic guidance from speech synthesis researcher Dr. Shinnosuke
Takamichi, the company started a new development this summer to add an
interpreted voice-over function to the platform. Dr. Takamichi is
Assistant Professor at Saruwatari & Koayama lab., Graduate School of
Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. If the
implemntation comes true, this will enable interpreted voice dubbing as well as
translation subtitling, which is expected to further expand its applications. It is
unclear whether the phonemes of the dubbed synthetic voice will be based
on on the original speaker’s audio.
AI Communis will use the
funds to improve transcription and video editing functions for YouTubers
and marketing video creators in aim to offer an easy localization
experience when transmitting content in their non-native languages. The
company aims to implement the voice-over function by next spring. Going
forward, the company plans to expand its business in the markets having
many heavy Auris users among Japan and Southeast Asian countries.
This guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning to the dark side of VC.” He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). He is the Managing Partner of Shizen Capital (formerly known as Tachi.ai Ventures) in Japan. You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here. I’ve been ruminating on how Web3 could potentially transform gig economy businesses — e.g. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Upwork, Taskrabbit, Fiverr, etc. — and whether applying token economics to these activities would even make sense. Two encounters over the past week have persuaded me that a decentralized model could address some of the failings of these established platforms. The first encounter was with the founder of one of the world’s newest Web3 ride-hailing projects. The second was with a research paper entitled, “Expanding the Locus of Resistance: Understanding the Co-constitution of Control and Resistance in the Gig Economy,” published by Hatim Rahman, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, and Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron. Rahman…
This
guest post is authored by Mark Bivens. Mark is a Silicon Valley native
and former entrepreneur, having started three companies before “turning
to the dark side of VC.”
He is a venture capitalist that travels between Paris and Tokyo (aka the RudeVC). He is the Managing Partner of Shizen Capital (formerly known as Tachi.ai Ventures) in Japan. You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here.
I’ve been ruminating on how Web3 could potentially transform gig economy businesses — e.g. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Upwork, Taskrabbit, Fiverr, etc. — and whether applying token economics to these activities would even make sense.
Two encounters over the
past week have persuaded me that a decentralized model could address
some of the failings of these established platforms.
Rahman and Cameron
suggest that the 5-star customer ratings system of these gig economy
platforms is broken. They argue that the disproportionate importance
of the customer review system subordinates gig workers to essentially
a ‘digital boss’, toward whom the workers have little recourse once
the rating is finalized and published. The customers, in contrast, do
not bear the consequences of negative reviews as acutely as the
workers do.
As a result, gig workers
devise ways to resist such authority. Tactics can include: carefully
vetting a customer’s behavior and prior reviews before accepting the
gig, offering discounts once the job is underway in order to elicit a
high rating, or even canceling the job before completion in order to
avoid a negative review.
As currently structured,
the Web2 ratings system abdicates power to people who do not possess
a vested interest in the gig worker’s business.
Improving alignment of
interests between gig worker and customer strikes me as a way that
decentralization can transform these platforms.
Let’s focus on on-demand
ride hailing. It’s hard to argue that this concept is not innovative,
yet businesses like Uber and Lyft have never reached sustained
profitability. Partly this is due to regulatory capture, i.e. when
the status of drivers was deemed to be that of employees rather than
independent contractors, hence requiring the platform to provide
substantial benefits, the economics of the model broke down. Yet
despite the regulatory impositions, drivers still struggle to make
ends meet, keeping all apps active in order to maximize their driving
throughput and undermining any particular loyalty to a single
platform.
The thesis of these
decentralized ride-hailing projects is essentially that token
economics will repair the broken model. Although there still appears
to be some experimentation around the specific tokenomics among these
new contenders, from what I can understand both drivers and riders
will earn platform-specific tokens as they use the service. Token
grants could be structured to reward both frequency of usage and
longevity, thus fostering loyalty from both the drivers and the
riders. If the right to drive for the platform is embedded in an NFT,
say, then this right could be transferable and appreciate in value
just as the taxi medallions used to do.
Of course, the devil is
in the details in the implementation of these models. However,
decentralization brings a new dimension to the economic model of the
business, which could render it viable again.
We’re at a moment where
Web3 has somewhat fallen out of favor as the trendy new thing (albeit
not yet in Japan where we’re still catching up). In my experience,
when the spotlight on a particular innovation shifts away, this is
often the best time for research and reflection on the transformative
potential of it.
Japanese ClimateTech startup Asuene announced on Monday that it has established a subsidiary called Asuzero Singapore. The company will provide the Asuzero GHG (green house gas) emission management platform as well as one-stop service to companies in the region for their decarbonization effort. Asuzero was established in October 2019 by Kohei Nishiwada, who previously worked for Mitsui & Co. on renewable energy-related projects around the world. The company offers Asuene and Asuzero. Asuene offers clean power that enables 100% renewable energy, local production for local consumption, and cost reduction while Asuzero is a cloud service that visualizes CO₂ emissions and enables carbon offsets. To date, the company has secured approximately 2.9 billion yen (about $20 million US) in funding. Pavillion Capital under Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state-run investment firm, and Axiom Asia, a private equity fund focused on the Asia-Pacific region, invested in the company in a Series B round this year. At the time of the funding, the company unveiled that it would start its Asian expansion. via PR Times
Japanese ClimateTech startup Asuene announced on Monday that it has established a subsidiary called Asuzero Singapore. The company will provide the Asuzero GHG (green house gas) emission management platform as well as one-stop service to companies in the region for their decarbonization effort.
Asuzero was established in October 2019 by Kohei Nishiwada, who previously worked for Mitsui & Co. on renewable energy-related projects around the world. The company offers Asuene and Asuzero. Asuene offers clean power that enables 100% renewable energy, local production for local consumption, and cost reduction while Asuzero is a cloud service that visualizes CO₂ emissions and enables carbon offsets.
To date, the company has secured approximately 2.9 billion yen (about $20 million US) in funding. Pavillion Capital under Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state-run investment firm, and Axiom Asia, a private equity fund focused on the Asia-Pacific region, invested in the company in a Series B round this year. At the time of the funding, the company unveiled that it would start its Asian expansion.
Tokyo-based Meleap, the Japanese startup offering the Hado Augmented Reality-powered sports in 39 countries, announced on Monday that it has secured 510 million yen (about $3.5 million US) in the latest round. The round is led by Shanghai-based QC Investment with participation from Incubate Fund, Horipro Group Holdings, Kiraboshi Capital, CiP Fund (managed by Eltes, Tokyu Land Corporation, Kajima Corporation, and East Investment Capital GP), and Waki Planning. This follows an investment from Interwars last December. In November last year, the company concluded a business and capital alliance with Horipro to create the “Talent League” (teams comprising of TV personalities as players) while having secured funds from Incubate Fund several times in the past. The latest round brought the company’s funding sum up to 2.2 billion yen ($15 million US). They will use the funds to accelerate its global expansion, market the Talent League, and strengthen its recruitment efforts. Hiroshi Fukuda (current CEO of Meleap), previously of Recruit, and Hitoshi Araki (current CTO of Meleap), previously of Fujitsu, established Meleap in 2014. The company has developed AR games that allow players to perform moves similar to the Kamehameha and Hadouken waves we have seen in animation series, and has 109…
Tokyo-based Meleap, the Japanese startup offering the Hado Augmented Reality-powered sports in 39 countries, announced on Monday that it has secured 510 million yen (about $3.5 million US) in the latest round. The round is led by Shanghai-based QC Investment with participation from Incubate Fund, Horipro Group Holdings, Kiraboshi Capital, CiP Fund (managed by Eltes, Tokyu Land Corporation, Kajima Corporation, and East Investment Capital GP), and Waki Planning.
This
follows an investment from Interwars last December. In November last
year, the company concluded a business and capital alliance with Horipro
to create the “Talent League” (teams comprising of TV personalities as
players) while having secured funds from Incubate Fund several times in
the past. The latest round brought the company’s funding sum up to 2.2
billion yen ($15 million US). They will use the funds to accelerate its
global expansion, market the Talent League, and strengthen its
recruitment efforts.
Hiroshi Fukuda (current CEO of Meleap), previously of Recruit, and Hitoshi Araki (current CTO of Meleap), previously of Fujitsu, established Meleap in 2014. The company has developed AR games that allow players to perform moves similar to the Kamehameha and Hadouken waves we have seen in animation series, and has 109 directly managed and permanent franchise locations in 39 countries that embody these games as sports. The company has a cumulative total of 3.5 million players and more than 100 million households watching the game. In addition, the Talent League, launched in 2020, allows viewers to cheer on players through the Wow Live app.
Tokyo-based Frame00 (pronounced ‘frame double oh’), the Japanese startup behind a blockchain-based monetization service for OSS (Open Source Software) developers called Dev Protocol, announced on Wednesday, that it has secured 250 million yen (about $1.7 million US) in a pre-series A round. For the company, this follows their seed round in June of 2022 and brought their funding sum up to about 310 million yen (about $2.1 million). This round was led by former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito-led web3 fund gmjp with participation from B Dash Ventures, SKY Perfect JSAT (TSE:9412), rikka, and 01Booster Capital. Mayumi Hara, CEO of Frame00, is expected to speak at the New Context Conference 2022 Fall to be organized by Digital Garage (TSE:4819) next month. Joi is the co-founder of Digital Garage. In aim to support the prosperity of OSS and the sustainability of community management, FRAME00 has been developing Dev, a protocol for sharing revenue with OSS developers. Dev tokens are redeemable for Ethereum tokens on crypto exchanges. Since its mainnet launch in 2020, the protocol has attracted new financial support for OSS developers around the world. They won the CJK (China, Japan, Korea) OSS Special Contribution Award at the North-East Asia…
Tokyo-based Frame00 (pronounced ‘frame double oh’), the Japanese startup behind a blockchain-based monetization service for OSS (Open Source Software) developers called Dev Protocol, announced on Wednesday, that it has secured 250 million yen (about $1.7 million US) in a pre-series A round. For the company, this follows their seed round in June of 2022 and brought their funding sum up to about 310 million yen (about $2.1 million).
This round was led by former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito-led web3 fund gmjp with participation from B Dash Ventures, SKY Perfect JSAT (TSE:9412), rikka, and 01Booster Capital. Mayumi Hara, CEO of Frame00, is expected to speak at the New Context Conference 2022 Fall to be organized by Digital Garage (TSE:4819) next month. Joi is the co-founder of Digital Garage.
In aim to support the prosperity of OSS and the sustainability of community management, FRAME00 has been developing Dev, a protocol for sharing revenue with OSS developers. Dev tokens are redeemable for Ethereum tokens on crypto exchanges.
Since its mainnet launch in 2020, the protocol has attracted new financial support for OSS developers around the world. They won the CJK (China, Japan, Korea) OSS Special Contribution Award at the North-East Asia Development Cooperation Forum last year.
Currently, the DEV protocol developer community has over 500 members. In response to the diversifying needs of the creator economy, including web3 and metaverse, the company will accelerate developing the Clubs no-code DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) tool. In September, the company set up a new office in Switzerland to comply with global regulatory and develop governance system.