Masaru started his career as a programmer/engineer, and previously co-founded several system integration companies and consulting firms. He’s been traveling around Silicon Valley and Asia exploring the IT industry, and he also curates event updates for the Tokyo edition of Startup Digest.
Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind the C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (about $1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund. The company plans to use the funds for system development efforts to give users better experience. In this space, we’ve seen many startups like Etsy (US), Creatty (Japan), and Pinkoi (Taiwan). But Creema is one of the oldest companies among them. Since its launch back in June of 2010, the company has acquired 18,000 creators and they have submitted over 500,000 items on the platform. Their founder and CEO Kotaro Marubayashi explained why they have grown their platform business spending a long time: I think this kind of websites usually takes time to make users understand what’s interesting. That’s why we’ve been carefully developing this community. What makes us unique from other similar services is that most of our creators are making a living by selling their items here. Their items are completely different from what people create as their hobby in their spare time. In order to gain people’s awareness for handmade products, the company holds an exhibition called ‘HandMade in Japan Fes‘ every year as well as has a real…
Tokyo-based Creema, the startup behind the C2C marketplace for handmade items, announced today that it has raised 100 million yen (about $1 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund. The company plans to use the funds for system development efforts to give users better experience.
In this space, we’ve seen many startups like Etsy (US), Creatty (Japan), and Pinkoi (Taiwan). But Creema is one of the oldest companies among them. Since its launch back in June of 2010, the company has acquired 18,000 creators and they have submitted over 500,000 items on the platform.
Their founder and CEO Kotaro Marubayashi explained why they have grown their platform business spending a long time:
I think this kind of websites usually takes time to make users understand what’s interesting. That’s why we’ve been carefully developing this community. What makes us unique from other similar services is that most of our creators are making a living by selling their items here. Their items are completely different from what people create as their hobby in their spare time.
Creema’s flagship store in Shinjuku
In order to gain people’s awareness for handmade products, the company holds an exhibition called ‘HandMade in Japan Fes‘ every year as well as has a real flagship store in the Shinjuku Lumine department store. As a result of these efforts, they have surpassed 15 million monthly page views, and the amount of transactions through their platform grows at a pace of 400% every year. Some creators earn more than $10,000 a month despite the fact that most of items are one-off originals.
Coinciding the funding, the company drives user traffic from Au Smart Pass, the unlimited app download service by KDDI, planning to add several payment methods for KDDI’s smartphone subscribers. Marubayashi added:
We’ve been developing our service diligently and steadily. We have a good revenue stream but we can try out something new using the money raised this time. But we’re not interested in increasing page views using ads. We believe there’s a huge potential in the manufacturing culture. We’ll focus on improving our system infrastructure to better serve our users.
In view of the Japanese C2C market, this handmade item market can create new values while second-hand platforms are saturated with mobile apps like Mercari and Fril. Since Japanese manufactured items are favorably rated among foreign consumers, we can expect this marketplace to meet demands from outside the country as well.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program. This is the part 2 of our quick rundown (See this article for part 1). Let’s have a look at the last six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months. Movie Lovie There are many events like public viewing or group jogging where you can share your fun time with other participants. But Movie Lovie founder Keisuke Nakamura wondered how we can share an experience with others when we watch a movie at a cinema theater. There are difficulties in “sharing” because the experience is heavily dependent on the content of the movie. Movie Lovie is an online platform and allows you to create a bulletin board for a movie you like, where you can enjoy interactions with other users before watching the movie. Movie distributors or theater owners can also create their boards online for encouraging consumers to come and watch their movies. The service will go live next month. Combinator Combinator is an online job site for startups which allows them to find their potential employees…
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.
This is the part 2 of our quick rundown (See this article for part 1). Let’s have a look at the last six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.
Movie Lovie
Keisuke Nakamura
There are many events like public viewing or group jogging where you can share your fun time with other participants. But Movie Lovie founder Keisuke Nakamura wondered how we can share an experience with others when we watch a movie at a cinema theater. There are difficulties in “sharing” because the experience is heavily dependent on the content of the movie.
Movie Lovie is an online platform and allows you to create a bulletin board for a movie you like, where you can enjoy interactions with other users before watching the movie. Movie distributors or theater owners can also create their boards online for encouraging consumers to come and watch their movies. The service will go live next month.
Combinator
Takumi Shimizu
Combinator is an online job site for startups which allows them to find their potential employees from a pool of people who have their current jobs and are not aggressively finding their next jobs. For engineers, you can sign up for the service and tag yourself with your skill sets so that other users can easily touch base with you.
Since the launch of its alpha version back in late March, notable startups such as Vinclu and Wizpra have succeeded in hiring eleven workers in total. The hiring platform has currently 72 projects and 2,000 users registered.
What differentiates it from other similar platforms is that it encourages users to switch to work for a new company by attracting such users to one of the company’s projects rather than the company itself.
Tabi no Tatsujin
Tabi no Tausjin (literally meaning ‘travel experts’ in Japanese) is an online marketplace for international travel, aiming to connect Japanese travelers with Japanese locals living in foreign travel destinations.
In terms of startups giving users similar experience, we’ve seen many startups including Meetrip, but most of these services require you to communicate with locals in English or their languages. So it will be difficult to use for Japanese users who are not good at speaking in unfamiliar languages.
With the service, their guides can help keep the traveler from being nervous while better enjoying their travel, even for those less familiar with local culture at the destination or worried about safety conditions there. The company has 150 select guides in 12 cities worldwide based on qualification checks via online interviews.
4meee!
Arisa Sakanashi
Women are always looking for tips regarding clothing dress-up or make-up. They used to get information from magazines but now they depend on online media. There are many curation sites offering useful tips for them, but these typically require much time to finish reading. That’s why Arisa Sakanashi and her team invented 4meee!, a user-generated content site in a four-panel comic strip style, specifically targeting teenage girls and women in their 20s.
They plan to monetize it by advertising, publishing advertorial posts, and embedding affiliate links to e-commerce sites. As of this writing, they have published 1,000 articles and surpassed 1 million monthly pageviews. They are currently planning to translate all articles into Chinese and start serving the Chinese markets.
Aorb
Jumpei Ikeda
Aorb is a mobile app that allows users to present two pictures and ask others to choose the best one. For example, when you can’t decided between two outfits, you can take pictures and upload them using the app. Subsequently, you will be able to see a list of responses from other users.
Every question posted gets 70 answers on average. Almost a half of their users are teenagers, and about 60% of them are females. So their primary users are high school girls. They have acquired users from 20 countries around the world because the app uses pictures, requiring no verbal communication. In view of a huge user base from the Asian regions, they are planning to add an English interface by the end of this month.
Hima Switch
Takuya Moriguchi
When you have spare time, this app helps you interact with other users who are also free. Takuya Moriguchi, the inventor of this app, had difficulty in finding someone who has time to spare via Facebook. The app allows you to chat using as short as 10 Japanese characters, while storing as little as past five sets of interactions.
They are planning to add a new feature of simple games this coming weekend (June 7-8). In order to improve their 7-day user retention rate to over 80%, they also plan to roll out a new gamification feature – the more you enjoy chatting with other users using the app, the more characters you are allowed to use in the chat feature – as well as proposing topics to discuss so as to keep them using the app.
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program. This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months. Eigooo! Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment. In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers. They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years. BrainWars BrainWars is a social quiz app and…
Tokyo-based startup incubator Movida Japan held a Demo Day event on Tuesday, showcasing 13 startups from the 5th batch of its incubation program.
This is the part 1 of our quick rundown. Let’s have a look at the first six presenters and how they have cultivated as well as executed their ideas over the past several months.
Eigooo!
From the left: Eigooo co-founders Peter Rothenberg, Mizuno Nozue
Eigooo is an online chat-based English learning service. When they initially launched its mobile app back in February, it initially marked a conversion rate of 1.85%. But we understand that they succeeded in improving it to 2.627% after its interface and function adjustment.
In similar services using Skype or other teleconferencing tools, a learning course is typically provided on a person-to-person basis, but is likely to require advance booking and charge users per hour. But Eigooo uses a text-based chat, so its teachers can interact with up ten students simultaneously, which requires no advance booking from students but pay a higher compensation to the teachers.
They are also planning to expand to mainland China and Korea in the future, aiming to hit an annual revenue of $60 million and go IPO in five years.
BrainWars
BrainWars is a social quiz app and pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. See these articles to learn how it works.
Categorific
Categorific is a data-mining service using the image recognition technology. Ikkyo Technology, the startup behind the service, initially started their business with providing a content monitoring service for web service companies, helping them eliminating pirated content from their web services using the same technology.
They have been consulted by their clients about the possibilities of a new business using an enormous collection of images stored for the aforementioned countermeasure application. As a result of that, their team has invented Categorific.
They explained that the new service can be adopted for many purposes. For example, if you sell a sticker for a messaging app like Line, you can help users choose other stickers that they may like, by giving them a recommendation based on the service.
Graph
Shunsuke Takahashi
In Japan, people are trying to find statics over 100 million times an year. Even if you could successfully find the one you wanted, you would need more than an hour to edit or visualize it to be used in your presentation deck.
Graph allows you to find the statistics you want easily and embed it on your blog post. They understand that there are several competitors in this space but most of their platforms have difficulties in search accuracy or usability. So the company plans to focus on increasing the variety of statistics and easy-to-understand infographics. They expect to acquire 1 billion annual page views and monetize it by launching a premium service.
Pedal Forge
Takakazu Nakamura
Pedal Forge aims to allow users to test out a musical instrument before they but it. They will launch a web service enabling users to play the guitar virtually, with aiming to help them choose at home before visiting a guitar shop.
The service will be available in Japanese, English, and French this month. Since musical instrument makers learn that this will help them promote better their products, they are seen willing to provide sampling tone data to the platform.
Sttir
Ryo Tsukahara
When you think about how to compose a song, some people create it from scratch but others would remix songs created by someone else. Sttir wants to focus on serving the latter users and help them easily obtain songs and remix them in a way, as in sharing open source codes in the programmer community. They want to be called a GitHub for musicians.
Live3
Kyohei Tejima
When you have no plan to hang out after hours, it’s likely hard to find an event you may like using conventional ways like typical search engines. Live3 is a mobile app and allows you to match with your nearby events whose organizers still have many tickets unsold.
The service gives you 10 choices of live performances happening nearby every day, and you can buy it on the Live3 website or app if you like it. They plan to monetize it by charging 10% of the ticket price as a commission fee to event organizers. Their average conversion rate is as high as 7.39%.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based PrimeAgain, the startup best known for its mobile apps DecoAlbum and DrawChat, introduced a video chat app called Winker today. The app is available for iOS in English and Japanese. It allows you to take a video clip or a snapshot in a limited time you choose from one to ten seconds for sharing with other users. A user receiving your clip can play or view it just once. The company’s co-founder and CEO Nobuhiro Abe told us what they expect from the app: When you upload a video clip to a social network platform, you will carefully decorate or edit it prior to uploading, since it will remain permanently. Some people appeared in the clip may feel uncomfortable if you publish it to the public. However, you will have less reluctance to upload it if it’s an ephemeral and short-time one. I think this our concept is pretty similar to human memory system where we typically forget past events as time goes by. According to Abe, the SnapChat app has surpassed 70 or 80 million downloads, most of which come from the US market. So there’s no key player in this space…
Tokyo-based PrimeAgain, the startup best known for its mobile apps DecoAlbum and DrawChat, introduced a video chat app called Winker today. The app is available for iOS in English and Japanese. It allows you to take a video clip or a snapshot in a limited time you choose from one to ten seconds for sharing with other users. A user receiving your clip can play or view it just once.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Nobuhiro Abe told us what they expect from the app:
When you upload a video clip to a social network platform, you will carefully decorate or edit it prior to uploading, since it will remain permanently. Some people appeared in the clip may feel uncomfortable if you publish it to the public. However, you will have less reluctance to upload it if it’s an ephemeral and short-time one. I think this our concept is pretty similar to human memory system where we typically forget past events as time goes by.
According to Abe, the SnapChat app has surpassed 70 or 80 million downloads, most of which come from the US market. So there’s no key player in this space especially in the Asian regions. As many of our readers can agree, the Line app dominates the Asian markets while WhatsApp does in Western countries. In a similar way, the company wants to position Winker as the ephemeral video sharing app for Asia while SnapChat mainly serving American users. Abe explained a bit about the app’s uniqueness:
You can invite your friends to Winker using Facebook, Twitter and Line. However, your clips posted on the app will be never shared via these social network platforms. If you link your Winker account to your Twitter account, your Twitter friends and you can follow on Winker each other.
In this space, we’ve seen competitors like Muuk (by Mixi), 5sec snaps (by DeNA), PicChat (by Cinnamon), and Commu Camera (by Yahoo Japan). PrimeAgain plans to differentiate the Winker app from these competitors by adding new functions in the near future. Furthermore, they want to explore a potential monetization model by giving their corporate users an API (application program interface) to allow them to gain access to their official Winker accounts.
Recruit Technologies, the IT company operating under Japanese human resources company Recruit Holdings, held an event called Berlin Innovation Meetup in Tokyo this week. Several entrepreneurs from Berlin presented about services they are developing and related aspects of their own startup scene back in Germany. Berlin is one of the world’s major tech hub, and Recruit Technologies has started a collaboration project with the startup community there last year, sending its engineers to work together with startups in Berlin. Through this experience, those engineers can understand more about the entrepreneurial mindset, perhaps becoming more inventive and innovative themselves in the future. The presentation session started with Xyo’s CEO Zoe Adamovicz. Her startup has developed an app discovery platform which gives users a new way to find mobile apps they like. HeadWave CEO Sophie Willborm presented her helmet loudspeaker device, which lets users listen to music while motorbiking, cycling, skiing, or snowboarding [1]. Peter Bihr introduced his Berlin-based hardware accelerator Hardware.co and IoT-focused conference Thingscon. Kiwi.ki is a startup that has developed a keyless entry solution using a small dongle and a smartsphone. Currently Recruit Technologies’ developer Yugo Kuzuhara is collaboratively working with the team. New York-born Leah Stuhltrager introduced her…
HeadWave CEO Sophie Willborm
Recruit Technologies, the IT company operating under Japanese human resources company Recruit Holdings, held an event called Berlin Innovation Meetup in Tokyo this week. Several entrepreneurs from Berlin presented about services they are developing and related aspects of their own startup scene back in Germany.
Berlin is one of the world’s major tech hub, and Recruit Technologies has started a collaboration project with the startup community there last year, sending its engineers to work together with startups in Berlin. Through this experience, those engineers can understand more about the entrepreneurial mindset, perhaps becoming more inventive and innovative themselves in the future.
Xyo’s CEO Zoe Adamovicz
The presentation session started with Xyo’s CEO Zoe Adamovicz. Her startup has developed an app discovery platform which gives users a new way to find mobile apps they like. HeadWave CEO Sophie Willborm presented her helmet loudspeaker device, which lets users listen to music while motorbiking, cycling, skiing, or snowboarding [1]. Peter Bihr introduced his Berlin-based hardware accelerator Hardware.co and IoT-focused conference Thingscon.
The Wye’s founder Leah Stuhltrager
Kiwi.ki is a startup that has developed a keyless entry solution using a small dongle and a smartsphone. Currently Recruit Technologies’ developer Yugo Kuzuhara is collaboratively working with the team. New York-born Leah Stuhltrager introduced her co-working space called The Wye, renovated from a historic post office in the heart of Berlin.
It will be interesting to see how this effort will bring something of value to the the startup communities in Berlin and Tokyo. If you missed out on this event but are interested, delegates will hold another meetup event at Samurai Startup Island on Monday, so please check it out.
I’m a little concerned that listening while on a street or in a public space may cause possible dangers. ↩
Tokyo-based Voyage Group, the internet company best known for the e-commerce and shopping portal EC Navi, has announced that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market today. The company will be listed on July 2nd. Formerly known as Axiv.com, the company was initially launched back in 1999 as the online marketing arm of Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. But CEO Shinsuke Usami bought the majority of their shares from CyberAgent and made the company an independent business entity. The aforementioned EC Navi is a shopping portal where you can earn rewards by purchasing an item at a tenant’s online shop or by answering an online survey. On a related note, the company has started broadcasting TV commercials here in Japan (see an example below) in order to improve consumer awareness in selected regions in the country.
Tokyo-based Voyage Group, the internet company best known for the e-commerce and shopping portal EC Navi, has announced that it has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market today. The company will be listed on July 2nd.
Formerly known as Axiv.com, the company was initially launched back in 1999 as the online marketing arm of Japanese internet giant CyberAgent. But CEO Shinsuke Usami bought the majority of their shares from CyberAgent and made the company an independent business entity.
The aforementioned EC Navi is a shopping portal where you can earn rewards by purchasing an item at a tenant’s online shop or by answering an online survey.
On a related note, the company has started broadcasting TV commercials here in Japan (see an example below) in order to improve consumer awareness in selected regions in the country.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United. The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com [1]. Low birth rate, high potential business The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around: Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United.
The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com[1].
Low birth rate, high potential business
The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around:
CEO Hiromichi Ando
Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per book). The premium option is costly, but it’s selling well. Grandparents want to see how their grandchildren are growing even if they live far away. This motivation helps us increase our sales per customer.
In a low-birth rate society like Japan, it is said that every child has six money streams, if you count parents and grandparents. This concept helps the company be more profitable despite the fact that its user base is not as much as is typically needed for monetization.
Becoming an information platform
The startup intends to shift its platform from family photo storage to a comprehensive information platform where users learn what others family members are doing in their daily lives. Ando explained:
Three or four family members are typically connected to each other on our platform. A couple may divorce or remarry after having their child, so we’ll add a feature that allows users to control privacy about their photo or messages.
He plans to use these latest funds to hire new people and enhance the platform’s features. They are currently a four-person team, but they’ll add a COO and several engineers to accelerate system development efforts.
Global expansion
So far the company has about 20% of users, or about 10,000 families, accessing Kiddy from outside Japan. Considering this demand, they have to think about the internationalization of the platform. Ando explained how they will address the problem:
International shipping has been available only for postcards but not for our photo album products. But considering that as many as 20% of users are from outside Japan, we asked our printing and shipping companies to enable international shipping of photo album products, starting in the first week of June. Shipping charges will be higher than domestic delivery, but I think there’s a huge demand from users out there.
The service is currently available in English and Japanese. But in order to better serve its global user base, they will add French and German interfaces this July. The company has already exhibited and presented at several startup conferences in Europe, such as LeWeb in Paris and WebSummit in Dublin. Ando feels that these promotional activities has helped them build brand awareness in those regions.
In this space we’ve already seen many competitors, including Kazoc, Nicori, BabyDays, Ikumemo, and Wellnote (See this article for details). But Kiddy fares better than these competitors on the App Store in terms of number of reviews and average rating.
Moving forward Kiddy will focus on improving user satisfaction, with the end goal of having the top market share in Japan and the rest of the world. They hope to surpass a million households worldwide by the end of 2015.
Open Network Lab is the incubation arm of Japanese internet company Digital Garage. DG Incubation is the startup-focused investment arm of Digital Garage. The investment arm of NetPrice.com has been rebranded to Beenos. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Last week I had a chance to visit Bangkok on the way back from an IT conference in Phuket. And while it’s hard to focus on startups and entrepreneurships during a time of political crisis, I decided to push on and speak with some local leaders in the tech space while I was there. Thailand is, of course, a country to be reckoned with when discussing global social media trends. The market has a great impact on the industry as a whole, with the country representing the world’s second largest user base of the Line messaging app. Many foreign entrepreneurs, including Japanese ones, have launched startups right here. BuzzCommerce’s Shinsuke Wakai is one of these entrepreneurs. For over ten years, he has been working with local people and businesses in Bangkok. He launched a cosmetics-focused buzz media site called Cosmenet four years ago, and has assisted cosmetics brands from the West, Thailand, and Japan market their products among local consumers. Cosmenet is very much Thailand’s answer to @Cosme, the Japanese cosmetics online giant. Brands in the cosmetics industry have been heavily dependent on mass media (e.g. TV commercials and magazines) for their promotional activities….
Last week I had a chance to visit Bangkok on the way back from an IT conference in Phuket. And while it’s hard to focus on startups and entrepreneurships during a time of political crisis, I decided to push on and speak with some local leaders in the tech space while I was there. Thailand is, of course, a country to be reckoned with when discussing global social media trends. The market has a great impact on the industry as a whole, with the country representing the world’s second largest user base of the Line messaging app. Many foreign entrepreneurs, including Japanese ones, have launched startups right here. BuzzCommerce’s Shinsuke Wakai is one of these entrepreneurs.
Cosmenet
For over ten years, he has been working with local people and businesses in Bangkok. He launched a cosmetics-focused buzz media site called Cosmenet four years ago, and has assisted cosmetics brands from the West, Thailand, and Japan market their products among local consumers. Cosmenet is very much Thailand’s answer to @Cosme, the Japanese cosmetics online giant.
Brands in the cosmetics industry have been heavily dependent on mass media (e.g. TV commercials and magazines) for their promotional activities. But many have turned to Cosmenet as a means to reach out to potential customers in a more efficient way. Wakai feels that a media site should provide a neutral perspective to readers, so he has refrained from selling cosmetics on Cosmenet. But since many of the products introduced on the site are difficult to purchase in the city, his team has been receiving frequent inquiries about where to buy them.
So Wakai decided to develop an e-commerce site specifically focused on selling cosmetics from outside Thailand to young local women. It’s called BuzzCommerce. When you import and sell cosmetics, you typically are required to get approval from the food and drug administration in that country — and as you might expect, that takes time. But Wakai’s partner has helped a Japanese drug store chain import products to Thailand, so she is quite good at the requisite paper work, and that has accelerated their business’s launch.
In Thailand, we’ve already seen several notable e-commerce sites like Tarad (by Rakuten) and WeLoveShopping (by Thai telco True, inspired by Tarad). However, the majority of e-commerce deals in the country are typically traded between consumers directly using Facebook or Instagram. On BuzzCommerce, whether young women take to their service will make or break the business.
The company recently raised an undisclosed sum from East Ventures, and Wakai is now completely devoted to developing the e-commerce site. If all goes as scheduled, the web version will be launched by the end of June, with mobile apps will follow in August or September.
On a related note, many of you may recall that Singapore-based cosmetics e-commerce site Luxola raised from several investors earlier this week. In the Asian region, we’ve seen many other subscription-based cosmetic e-commerce services, as well as vertical buzz sites like Fashionguide in Taiwan.
Rocket Internet had been rapidly launching e-commerce services in the Asia region, but they have no portfolio company focused on this space after they sold GlossyBox to VanityTrobe in February of last year. I understand that this left market opportunities in the cosmetics industry in the region, which perhaps leaves room for BuzzCommerce to expand business beyond from Thailand if all goes well.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Hachimenroppi, which operates a fish delivery service for restaurants, announced yesterday that it has partnered with JCB, one of Japan’s leading credit card companies. Through this partnership, JCB will provide restaurants with credit purchase options and ease the process of buying fish from the delivery startup. Moreover, JCB will promote the startup’s service to its card member restaurants. Hachimenroppi buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese restaurants or diners, according to specific needs. Unlike existing wholesalers, they balance supply and demand using digital tools, allowing restaurants to order fish based on their customers’ needs rather than submitting to suppliers’ convenience. We previously outlined the specific details about how it works, so please check it out if you’d like to read more. The company raised about $1.5 million back in October in order to hire talented staffers and accelerate system development. They appointed Kenichi Saito as CTO earlier this month, who previously served as CTO at Japanese shoe-focused e-commerce site Locondo. To date the company has been outsourcing their system development, but they plan to set up a system development department (led by Saito) where they…
Tokyo-based startup Hachimenroppi, which operates a fish delivery service for restaurants, announced yesterday that it has partnered with JCB, one of Japan’s leading credit card companies. Through this partnership, JCB will provide restaurants with credit purchase options and ease the process of buying fish from the delivery startup. Moreover, JCB will promote the startup’s service to its card member restaurants.
Hachimenroppi buys fish from markets and brokers across the country and delivers it to Japanese restaurants or diners, according to specific needs. Unlike existing wholesalers, they balance supply and demand using digital tools, allowing restaurants to order fish based on their customers’ needs rather than submitting to suppliers’ convenience. We previously outlined the specific details about how it works, so please check it out if you’d like to read more.
The company raised about $1.5 million back in October in order to hire talented staffers and accelerate system development. They appointed Kenichi Saito as CTO earlier this month, who previously served as CTO at Japanese shoe-focused e-commerce site Locondo. To date the company has been outsourcing their system development, but they plan to set up a system development department (led by Saito) where they can do most of that work in house. In addition to the iOS app, they are planning to launch an Android version, but now they are focusing on hiring Rails engineers. So if you are interested in working with an up-and-coming startup like this one, don’t hesitate to contact them.
To step up their sales and engineering efforts, the company plans to grow to a 50-person team by summer. According to founder and CEO Masanari Matsuda, he plans to allocate about 80% of the team to customer relations serving restaurants, and the rest to system development. He elaborated:
CEO Masanari Matsuda
In order to provide consumers with the best quality foods, I think restaurants shouldn’t be dominated by big companies. When an independent chef launches his own restaurant, he will be unable to buy ingredients on credit from wholesalers because that restaurant has no financial history. So our new service in partnership with JCB will help them a lot when starting out.
We’ll focus on fish delivery for the time being. However, our platform is receiving orders and updates from restaurants, which means we can enhance it to deal with a variety of food in the future, including rice, liquors, meat, vegetables, and fruits. As we know much about restaurants’ needs, we may even launch a new service sending cooks to restaurants.
The company has acquired 300 restaurants as of the end of last year. They expect to increase that to 1,000 restaurants by the end of this year, and 10,000 by the end of 2016. By 2020, they hope to generate over $3 billion in revenue, which accounts for almost 10% of the entire national fishery market volume.
Tokyo-based English learning platform Rarejob has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market today. Since its launch back in October of 2007, the company has hired native speakers (mainly students from high profile universities in the Philippines) as English conversation teachers who instruct Japanese students over Skype. As of last August, the company had provided over 10 million lessons to over 200,000 Japanese users. Some of our readers may recall the company raised 330 million yen (or about $3.3 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund, YJ Capital, and CyberAgent last June [1]. Via IT Media KDDI Open Innovation Fund is jointly managed by KDDI and Global Brain. YJ Capital is the investment arm of Yahoo Japan. ↩
Tokyo-based English learning platform Rarejob has been approved for an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market today.
Since its launch back in October of 2007, the company has hired native speakers (mainly students from high profile universities in the Philippines) as English conversation teachers who instruct Japanese students over Skype. As of last August, the company had provided over 10 million lessons to over 200,000 Japanese users.
Some of our readers may recall the company raised 330 million yen (or about $3.3 million) from KDDI Open Innovation Fund, YJ Capital, and CyberAgent last June [1].
