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Meet top 4 startups with decentralized apps from d10e blockchain conference in Tokyo

d10e

The Bridge 2018.05.03

This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology. d10e — dubbed “The Leading Conference On Decentralization” — held the 21st Global Edition from April 28 to May 1, 2018. The venue, Hilton Tokyo Bay Hotel located near Tokyo Disneyland/DisneySea, gathered numerous participants who foresee far-reaching changes being brought on by adoption of blockchain technology, especially by localities and businesses. The first and second days were spent by Blockchain Investors Consortium (BIC), one of the main event sponsors, familiarizing d10e-goers with Tokyo. Keynote speeches were presented on the third day. On the final day, 22 teams gathered to present their revolutionary wares during the 1st Edition in Japan Startup Pitch (MC: Ms. Naomi Brockwell). Leonardo Render Chief Strategy Officer Delon de Metz, the energetic (enough to jump off the stage and safely too) young man with the winning message at this year’s inaugural Japan pitch competition, got First Prize. The visual rendering services company headquartered on Madison Avenue in New York convinced all that their business is ready to roll. The runner-up was Ms. Liina Laas-Billson, Chief Business Development Officer for Black Insurance, the digital insurance company on blockchain….

This is a guest post authored by “Tex” Pomeroy. He is a Tokyo-based writer specializing in ICT and high technology.

Randy Hencken, Co-founder of floating seasteading company Blue Frontiers, delivered his keynote speech.
Image credit: Kurt Hanson / The Bridge

d10e — dubbed “The Leading Conference On Decentralization” — held the 21st Global Edition from April 28 to May 1, 2018. The venue, Hilton Tokyo Bay Hotel located near Tokyo Disneyland/DisneySea, gathered numerous participants who foresee far-reaching changes being brought on by adoption of blockchain technology, especially by localities and businesses.

The first and second days were spent by Blockchain Investors Consortium (BIC), one of the main event sponsors, familiarizing d10e-goers with Tokyo. Keynote speeches were presented on the third day. On the final day, 22 teams gathered to present their revolutionary wares during the 1st Edition in Japan Startup Pitch (MC: Ms. Naomi Brockwell).

Delon de Metz, Chief Strategy Offier of Leonardo Render
Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy / The Bridge

Leonardo Render Chief Strategy Officer Delon de Metz, the energetic (enough to jump off the stage and safely too) young man with the winning message at this year’s inaugural Japan pitch competition, got First Prize. The visual rendering services company headquartered on Madison Avenue in New York convinced all that their business is ready to roll.

Liina Laas-Billson, Chief Business Development Officer of Black Insurance
Image credit: d10e

The runner-up was Ms. Liina Laas-Billson, Chief Business Development Officer for Black Insurance, the digital insurance company on blockchain. The demure pitch for the Estonian outfit gained Second Prize as it explained elegantly how its platform connects insurance brokers directly with capital, enabling them to launch their own virtual insurance agencies.

Cereal Finance CEO Sergey Vart (left) and a pitch judge
Image credit: “Tex” Pomeroy / The Bridge

Third Prize was garnered by Cereal Finance Co-founder & CEO Sergey Vart, who heads the St. Petersburg-based provider of blockchain ecosystem for asset-based loans. Finally, the Audience Award went to ZPER (according to Marketing Manager DK Yoon, pronounced ‘Zee-per’) of Singapore, offering a decentralized ecosystem for P2P finance.

George Hahn, co-founder and CGO of ZPER
Image credit: d10e

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Good Luck 3 to launch Ethereum game app Crypto-Oink, Japan’s answer to CryptoKitties

Masaru Ikeda 2018.05.01

See the original story in Japanese. Fukuoka, Japan-based Good Luck 3, jointly with Tokyo-based internet marketing company Ceres (TSE:3696), held a press conference on Friday in Tokyo, where they will be soon releasing Ethereum-based game DApp called Crypto-Oink. The app will be available on the web and via mobile app but the exact launch date is not yet confirmed. The app allows users to collect pig characters to breed and create new species, or buy and sell them with other users. With the crypto-wallet function, the app can prove these transactions and store them on a blockchain so that users can buy/sell cryptos at Ethereum exchanges or trade pigs with other users. Good Luck 3 plans to monetize by selling characters and auction commissions. With the Crypto-Oink app, the company wants to help even non-blockchain savvy people get familiar with DApps by leveraging a familiar topic like games to lower the hurdles. Ceres has recently invested in crypto exchanges such as Bitbank and Coincheck in addition to blockchain startups like Orb (Distributed Ledger Technology developer) and Sivira (blockchain app developer). Kazuhisa Inoue, CEO of Good Luck 3, said in the conference that his company wants to make the DApp successful…

From left: Kazuhisa Inoue (CEO of Good Luck 3), Satoshi Takagi (CEO of Ceres)
Image credit: Masaru Ikeda

See the original story in Japanese.

Fukuoka, Japan-based Good Luck 3, jointly with Tokyo-based internet marketing company Ceres (TSE:3696), held a press conference on Friday in Tokyo, where they will be soon releasing Ethereum-based game DApp called Crypto-Oink. The app will be available on the web and via mobile app but the exact launch date is not yet confirmed.

The app allows users to collect pig characters to breed and create new species, or buy and sell them with other users. With the crypto-wallet function, the app can prove these transactions and store them on a blockchain so that users can buy/sell cryptos at Ethereum exchanges or trade pigs with other users.

Good Luck 3 CEO Inoue introduces Crypto-Oink
Image credit: Masaru Ikeda

Good Luck 3 plans to monetize by selling characters and auction commissions. With the Crypto-Oink app, the company wants to help even non-blockchain savvy people get familiar with DApps by leveraging a familiar topic like games to lower the hurdles.

Ceres has recently invested in crypto exchanges such as Bitbank and Coincheck in addition to blockchain startups like Orb (Distributed Ledger Technology developer) and Sivira (blockchain app developer). Kazuhisa Inoue, CEO of Good Luck 3, said in the conference that his company wants to make the DApp successful by joining the forces of their capability of an entertainment content developer with those of Ceres owning multiple blockchain startups.

See also:

Rare Bits raises $6 million for site where you can buy and sell CryptoKitties (VentureBeat)
CryptoKitties: Blockchain-based collectible hit debuts in China (VentureBeat)

Since its launch back in February of 2013 in Japan’s western city of Fukuoka, Good Luck 3 has released outstanding game apps like Touch Gudetama! and Aerial Legends, and also recently been developing a blockchain-focused social platform called LuckyMe (to be launched this summer).

While blockchain transactions generally take some time to confirm, Good Luck 3 has also developed a private blockchain network called LuckyMe Reward System, expecting to reduce user churn with a smooth in-app purchase process for blockchain-based game apps. Going forward, they try to form an ecosystem involving third-party developers of DApps.

With an aim to promote Crypto-Oink and LuckyMe globally, Good Luck 3 plans to exhibit at Latitude 59, a global startup conference in Tallinn, Estonia on May 24 and 25th.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Raksul, Japanese online printing and on-demand logistics startup, files for IPO

Raksul

SCORE 1,379

Masaru Ikeda 2018.04.27

Tokyo-based Raksul, an online printing and delivery startup, announced today that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 31 May with plans to offer 2,500,000 shares for public subscription and to sell up to 1,642,100 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 8,449,900 shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting. Led by the company’s CEO Yasukane Matsumoto (21.55%), its major shareholders include OPT Holding (17.78%, TSE:2389) and Development Bank of Japan (8.91%). According to the consolidated statement as of July of 2017, they posted a revenue of 7.68 billion yen (about 70.2 million) with an ordinary loss of 1.16 billion ($10.6 million) and a net loss of 1.18 million yen ($10.8 million). Founded in 2009, Raksul is a Japanese company which provides printing services in partnership with printing facilities across its home country as a fabless operator. Users can place printing orders at affordable rates because the company takes advantage of downtime at participating printers to complete those orders. Additionally, the company provides the Hacobell on-demand delivery service as well as a flyer delivery service for small and medium-sized enterprises. See also: Japanese…

Raksul and Hacobell
Image credit: Raksul

Tokyo-based Raksul, an online printing and delivery startup, announced today that its IPO application to the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has been approved. The company will be listed on the TSE Mothers Market on 31 May with plans to offer 2,500,000 shares for public subscription and to sell up to 1,642,100 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 8,449,900 shares. Daiwa Securities will lead the underwriting.

Led by the company’s CEO Yasukane Matsumoto (21.55%), its major shareholders include OPT Holding (17.78%, TSE:2389) and Development Bank of Japan (8.91%).

According to the consolidated statement as of July of 2017, they posted a revenue of 7.68 billion yen (about 70.2 million) with an ordinary loss of 1.16 billion ($10.6 million) and a net loss of 1.18 million yen ($10.8 million).

Founded in 2009, Raksul is a Japanese company which provides printing services in partnership with printing facilities across its home country as a fabless operator. Users can place printing orders at affordable rates because the company takes advantage of downtime at participating printers to complete those orders. Additionally, the company provides the Hacobell on-demand delivery service as well as a flyer delivery service for small and medium-sized enterprises.

See also:

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Japan’s analytics startup Plaid snags $25M to help companies refine customer experience

Karte
Plaid

SCORE 1,805

Takeshi Hirano 2018.04.26

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Plaid, the Japanese startup offering a real-time data analysis of website visitors called Karte, announced last week that it has secured funding from Femto Partners, Eight Roads Ventures Japan, Mitsui & Co., Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and others. Combining funds through the investment aforementioned with loans from Mizuho Bank and other financial institutions, the company secured about 2.7 billion yen (around $25M US) at this time. Details including stock holding ratios were not disclosed. The latest announcement means that the company has thus far raised 3.4 billion yen (about $32M) in total, including previous funds from Femto Growth Capital and Eight Roads Ventures Japan. Plaid employs 90 people when all contract forms are included. Since its launch back in March of 2015, Karte had been introduced to 1,430 companies by March of 2017. The number of user companies has been undisclosed since the third year after the launch; instead, the company released the cumulative number of users analyzed by the service, which is 2.2 billion. Also, since around half of the companies introducing Karte are commerce enterprises, the company revealed that the total transactions…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Plaid, the Japanese startup offering a real-time data analysis of website visitors called Karte, announced last week that it has secured funding from Femto Partners, Eight Roads Ventures Japan, Mitsui & Co., Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and others.

Combining funds through the investment aforementioned with loans from Mizuho Bank and other financial institutions, the company secured about 2.7 billion yen (around $25M US) at this time. Details including stock holding ratios were not disclosed. The latest announcement means that the company has thus far raised 3.4 billion yen (about $32M) in total, including previous funds from Femto Growth Capital and Eight Roads Ventures Japan.

Plaid employs 90 people when all contract forms are included. Since its launch back in March of 2015, Karte had been introduced to 1,430 companies by March of 2017. The number of user companies has been undisclosed since the third year after the launch; instead, the company released the cumulative number of users analyzed by the service, which is 2.2 billion. Also, since around half of the companies introducing Karte are commerce enterprises, the company revealed that the total transactions dealt with through the platform was 548 billion yen (nearly $5.1B US). Furthermore, as confirmed by CEO Kenta Kurahashi, this total reflects the total value of products actually purchased after users visit the websites of companies using Karte.

According to the press release, the company also achieved a monthly surplus in March of 2017, and the funds raised this time will be used mainly for marketing, strengthening recruitment for all positions, and overseas service expansion.

Turning into customer experience platform

In the past, Karte used access analysis and marketing-related tools to create simple figures expressed as “1 PV (page views)” and “1 UU (unique users)” and use them as actual visiting opportunities, and opened up the category of “better taking care of online customers” to respond to this while analyzing finer actions.

In its third year the company will now use these existing concepts to provide a new “CX Platform (customer experience platform)” that is a more customer-centered marketing analytics service. Kurahashi explains the difference between Karte and other marketing tools by relating that the total use distribution among companies using Karte becomes larger.

(When talking about companies using Karte) Karte makes people visible, so it can take on the customer’s perspective, what they want, who they want to buy it, and why they want it. Many of the conventional tools (for raising sales and setting indicators) are corporate-oriented, and there is nothing to prompt action by understanding the user’s voice.

Every year since 2011 the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog has been creating and publishing a marketing chaos map (see below), and as the map shows, the number of available tools continues to increase every year. While many claim to automate, there are times when companies must pay high-cost consulting fees to actually introduce the tools. Kurahashi also said, “It’s strange that you have to give it all you’ve got to master them,” but that is the exact world-view.

From Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. Click to enlarge.

Karte is based on the idea of returning marketing to the customer’s viewpoint, which must first be realized by thoroughly visualizing the customers who are hard to see on the web. The company takes what is natural for customer service in spaces with physical stores and brings it to the web. The increase in companies using Karte and the total amount of distribution, as well as the number of users analyzed, demonstrates that this idea is accepted.

Karte has undergone a great renewal in April, and in particular the visualization of user behavior in real time has become more useful. The company introduced a score function this time which measures users’ experiences as satisfactory and unsatisfactory, and adds visibility that allows them to bring forward the users who need support.

Additionally, up to now the company has visualized each user who visited a site as 1 UU on a timeline, and with the renewal it has strengthened this function by introducing mirroring capabilities that allow administrators to see which site flow lines the user actually traced. With this, it has become possible to judge at a glance when, where, and in which situation the user took action.

Kurahashi creates a customer-centered analysis culture through these renewals and aims to acquire and expand Plaid’s own positioning.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

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Dr. Fellow wins OnLab Demo Day in Tokyo with clinical case sharing tool for doctors

Open Network Lab

Masaru Ikeda 2018.04.25

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab last week held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 16th batch. From among 84 teams including 17 applicants from overseas, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and support during a three-month period. Five of the six teams excepting one disclosed team gave pitches within the event, then awarded by votes of major mentors and the audience. The judges for the pitch session were as follows: Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage) Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com) Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com) Rei Inamoto (Co-founder / Creative Director, Inamoto & Co.) Best Team Award winner: Dr. Fellow by Fellow Dr. Fellow is a clinical case-sharing platform for medical doctors. It is common to share clinical cases by case presentation through academic journals or academic conferences but these conventional methods are inefficient for busy doctors. By creating a non-anonymous doctor community, Dr. Fellow enables clinical case-sharing among doctors in the open for a wider range of medical fields. For example, although 200,000 stroke events are estimated to occur annually, only 2,000 cases (1% of the total cases) have been reported in the form of academic articles. In the…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab last week held Demo Day for its Seed Accelerator Program 16th batch. From among 84 teams including 17 applicants from overseas, six teams were chosen to receive mentoring and support during a three-month period.

Five of the six teams excepting one disclosed team gave pitches within the event, then awarded by votes of major mentors and the audience.

The judges for the pitch session were as follows:

Kaoru Hayashi (CEO / Group CEO, Digital Garage)
Shonosuke Hata (CEO, Kakaku.com)
Atsuhiro Murakami (Director, Kakaku.com)
Rei Inamoto (Co-founder / Creative Director, Inamoto & Co.)

Best Team Award winner: Dr. Fellow by Fellow

Dr. Fellow is a clinical case-sharing platform for medical doctors. It is common to share clinical cases by case presentation through academic journals or academic conferences but these conventional methods are inefficient for busy doctors. By creating a non-anonymous doctor community, Dr. Fellow enables clinical case-sharing among doctors in the open for a wider range of medical fields.

For example, although 200,000 stroke events are estimated to occur annually, only 2,000 cases (1% of the total cases) have been reported in the form of academic articles. In the conventional online doctor communities, information sharing based on Q&A style between doctors is available, but the strength of Dr. Fellow is that direct clinical case-sharing using images or text information of clinical cases.

The team aims to monetize through fixed-amount charging by issuing their official accounts targeting companies / academic societies and rate charging by in-feed ads targeting doctors.

Audience Award winner: ReShape by Navier

Navier, the team consisting of three engineers, develops AI (artificial intelligence)-driven image-editing service named ReShape. To edit digital images including shake correction, exposure correction or trimming, image-editing tools are commonly used but requires specialized skill or labor and cost.

ReShape enables easy use of advanced image-editing techniques by applying Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology. Not correcting target image but creating new one by GAN, ReShape can provide higher quality images rather than ones corrected by professionals. The team expects to charge 20 yen (about 20 cents) per edited image for individual users and a monthly flat-rate fee for amateur photographers or photo productions.

Brushing up the service as providing it through web or app during the early stage, the team will provide the service for business operators through cloud API (Application Programming Interface) in the future. Also it plans a quality improvement service of videos using GAN.

Hale by LINK

Hale, developed by LINK, is a nursing-care concierge service to realize wishes. Some persons in care have much wealth but cannot enjoy their hobbies such as going on a trip to an island, dining at a three-star restaurant or going to a favorite singer’s concert which require constant nursing care.

At Hale, its staffers conduct arrangement of welfare vehicles or preparatory investigation of facilities to visit, while interviewing users’ requests and confirming physical / disease conditions. Partnering restaurants, hotels or travel agencies, the team provides the service in two charging systems: a fixed rate system with the service of nurse under an exclusive contract with Hale and an optional charging system for each matter.

Pickupon by Pickupon

Generally, 64% of functions implemented in software have not been used on the average, although a great amount of labor was spent for the development. The Pickupon team thought the cause of this gap was that engineers did not collect users’ comments or impression directly so that they could not analyze user demands quantitatively, and the team developed a SaaS (Software as a Service) for transcribing / analyzing / recording users’ utterances.

Pickupon records primary information as is and enables sharing among several people to realize correct information, preventing missed information. By analyzing multiple utterances integrally, it enables acquisition of tendencies and consideration of measures too. The team provides the service in a freemium system allowing users to hold data up to six hours for free.

ShareTable by ShareTable

ShareTable is sitter / nursery teacher matching service targeting households in which both partners working that have elementary school children. An investigation by the team conducted through interviews of 70 households showed that most of them use private childcare support services, private schools or Family Support Centers, the childcare support service run by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare during work-hours. However, these services have drawbacks such as limited locations or requiring labor to pick up and drop children off.

To solve these problems, ShareTable offers an afterschool class to study home economics centered on food. The team offers situational learning at teachers’ home close to users’ home on weekdays and somewhere outside on holidays or during long vacations. ShareTable matches households needing childcare and individuals / companies providing classes and charges 20% as commission fees.

According to Masahiko Sarukawa, Director of DG Incubation organizing Open Network Lab, the accelerator has produced 91 startups in total with the completion of this 15th batch. The rate of successful fundraising by startups being produced through 15 batches reached 57.5%.

Coinciding with the holding of this 16th Demo Day, Open Network Lab has started accepting applications to the 17th batch. It will provide 10 million yen (about $92,000) maximum as activity funding for this batch over three months. Also it plans to provide the right to use three bases (in Daikanyama of Tokyo and Kamakura, plus San Francisco) gratis for a year, and mentoring by managers of startups that came out of the past Seed Accelerator Program. The application deadline for the 17th batch is noon on May 21th (Japan Standard Time).

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Japan’s promising SaaS startup Nulab to set up community space in Singapore

nulab

Masaru Ikeda 2018.04.25

The Japanese startup Nulab, offering various SaaS (software as a service) such as BackLog, Cacoo and Typetalk, announced today that it will set up a community space in Singapore called NuSpace. Startups using Nulab products (owning Nulab user accounts) can make use of it gratis as a base for business expansion efforts in Southeast Asia as well as for their market research activities. The firm claims the recent increase in Nulab users and large-scale expansion of Japanese startups into Southeast Asian region have allowed them to decide on establishing the venue. NuSpace will not only serve local developer/designer communities in helping them organize meetups but also in offering seminars and Nulab product user support. Nulab wants potential venue users to sign up online beforehand, although the website for it is still under development. Thus these users are encouraged to enter their email address when using this form so that they can be notified when the website becomes available. In the past Nulab had set up shop in Taiwan, New York and Amsterdam, in addition to several offices in Japan. They used to have an office in Singapore (in the Arab Street neighborhood) but shut it down after Nulab Singapore’s Taiwanese…

NuSpace Singapore (For illustrative purposes only, may differ from the actual photoshoot.)
Image credit: Nulab

The Japanese startup Nulab, offering various SaaS (software as a service) such as BackLog, Cacoo and Typetalk, announced today that it will set up a community space in Singapore called NuSpace. Startups using Nulab products (owning Nulab user accounts) can make use of it gratis as a base for business expansion efforts in Southeast Asia as well as for their market research activities.

The firm claims the recent increase in Nulab users and large-scale expansion of Japanese startups into Southeast Asian region have allowed them to decide on establishing the venue. NuSpace will not only serve local developer/designer communities in helping them organize meetups but also in offering seminars and Nulab product user support.

Nulab wants potential venue users to sign up online beforehand, although the website for it is still under development. Thus these users are encouraged to enter their email address when using this form so that they can be notified when the website becomes available.

In the past Nulab had set up shop in Taiwan, New York and Amsterdam, in addition to several offices in Japan. They used to have an office in Singapore (in the Arab Street neighborhood) but shut it down after Nulab Singapore’s Taiwanese community manager Lillian Lu went back to Taiwan. With the launch of NuSpace at this time, it is expected to resume some functions as mainstay Singapore office for the company.

The detailed location of renewed NuSpace Singapore has not yet been announced but it seems like it will be located within the neighborhood of MRT Expo Station, one stop from Changi Airport towards downtown Singapore. Since Nulab has a café space to host employee and community events within the company’s Fukuoka headquarters penthouse, the new Singapore presence will apparently emulate it in terms of usage concept and interior design.

Despite the fact that the ASEAN market generally for co-working spaces is saturated, we have been seeing some Japanese startups establish their own spaces in an effort to further engage with local user and developer communities in the region.

See also:

Japan’s Nulab gets first cash injection in 13-year history, poised for exponential growth

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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The Bridge announces acquisition by PR Times

The Bridge 2018.04.19

The Bridge announced today that it has agreed to be acquired by Tokyo-based PR Times (TSE:3922), the Japanese promotion agency focused on distributing press releases on behalf of client companies. See also: Japanese startup-focused promotion agency PR Times files for IPO As a result of the deal, The Bridge will continue covering and serving startups and ecosystems as the media outlet have been doing to date. Both parties will strengthen publishing news articles, organize community events, and launch other joint programs for encouraging startups and entrepreneurs. Our announcement in Japanese Press release by PR Times (in Japanese)

The Bridge announced today that it has agreed to be acquired by Tokyo-based PR Times (TSE:3922), the Japanese promotion agency focused on distributing press releases on behalf of client companies.

See also:

Japanese startup-focused promotion agency PR Times files for IPO

As a result of the deal, The Bridge will continue covering and serving startups and ecosystems as the media outlet have been doing to date.

Both parties will strengthen publishing news articles, organize community events, and launch other joint programs for encouraging startups and entrepreneurs.

Our announcement in Japanese
Press release by PR Times (in Japanese)

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Yamap, mountaineers community app from Japan, secures $11M in series B round

Yamap

Masaru Ikeda 2018.04.19

See the original story in Japanese. Fukuoka-based Yamap, which operates a community platform for mountaineers, announced on Friday at a press conference held in Tokyo that it has fundraised about 1.2 billion yen (around $11.2M US) in a series B round. The following 14 companies and funds participated in this round: ICI Ishii Sports Kyushu Wide Area Reconstruction Assistance Fund (managed by REVIC Capital) FFG Venture Business Partners (Investment arm of Fukuoka Bank) Yamaguchi Capital (Investment arm of Yamaguchi Bank) I Mercury Capital SMBC Venture Capital Setouchi Kanko Kasseika Fund (Managed by Setouchi DMO) Japan Asia Group SRL Oita Venture Capital (Investment arm of Oita Bank) Sagin Capital & Consulting (Investment arm of Saga Bank) Hiroshima Venture Capital (Investment arm of Hiroshima Bank) Morinaga (TSE:2201) 01Booster Keeping in mind the participation of numerous funds supported by regional banks, we can assume the intention is for Yamap to contribute to the revitalization of regional tourism. The company revealed that the amount raised from Japan’s largest outdoor retailer, ICI Ishii Sports, is the largest of the 14 contributions, although the amount received from each company and fund individually was not disclosed. For Yamap, this round follows the seed round which saw 5…

Yamap CEO Yoshi Haruyama with the investors who participated this round
Image credit: Masaru Ikeda

See the original story in Japanese.

Fukuoka-based Yamap, which operates a community platform for mountaineers, announced on Friday at a press conference held in Tokyo that it has fundraised about 1.2 billion yen (around $11.2M US) in a series B round.

The following 14 companies and funds participated in this round:

ICI Ishii Sports
Kyushu Wide Area Reconstruction Assistance Fund (managed by REVIC Capital)
FFG Venture Business Partners (Investment arm of Fukuoka Bank)
Yamaguchi Capital (Investment arm of Yamaguchi Bank)
I Mercury Capital
SMBC Venture Capital
Setouchi Kanko Kasseika Fund (Managed by Setouchi DMO)
Japan Asia Group
SRL
Oita Venture Capital (Investment arm of Oita Bank)
Sagin Capital & Consulting (Investment arm of Saga Bank)
Hiroshima Venture Capital (Investment arm of Hiroshima Bank)
Morinaga (TSE:2201)
01Booster

Keeping in mind the participation of numerous funds supported by regional banks, we can assume the intention is for Yamap to contribute to the revitalization of regional tourism. The company revealed that the amount raised from Japan’s largest outdoor retailer, ICI Ishii Sports, is the largest of the 14 contributions, although the amount received from each company and fund individually was not disclosed.

For Yamap, this round follows the seed round which saw 5 million yen funding (about $46.6K US) from Samurai Incubate and the series A round (March 2016) in which it fundraised 170 million yen (about $1.5M US) from Colopl (TSE: 3668), Daiwa Corporate Investment, and Dogan. With the latest round at this time, the total amount fundraised to date for Yamap has reached about 14 billion yen (around $12.8M US).

Yamap Founder and CEO Yoshi Haruyama explaining the intention behind the fundraising and business partnership
Image credit: Masaru Ikeda

In addition to announcing the fundraising, Yamap also revealed that it has partnered with Ishii Sports, one of the investors this time around. Through this partnership the two companies will implement measures such as cooperation between members of Yamap and Ishii Sports, collaboration between Yamap and Ishii Sports stores (33 throughout Japan), and the expansion of joint events put on by the two companies. With the renewal of Ishii Sport’s e-commerce platform planned this fall, they also expect some sort of system integration with Yamap.

Mountaineering enthusiast Yoshi Haruyama (Founder/CEO) established Yamap in 2013 (the name at establishment was Sefuri). Even in mountains unreachable by cellular radio waves, the company has developed a map app called Yamap that allows mountaineers to know their current location by using the GPS radio waves of satellites.

See also:

Yamap: Japan’s online vertical community for mountaineers that looks to the top

In 2014, the company was adopted into the first batch of IBM Blue Hub, the IBM Incubation Program in Tokyo, followed by winning the pitch arena of B Dash Camp 2015 Spring held in Fukuoka.

In July of 2015, the company released Yamap Gears, an outdoor equipment review app, its own insurance plans, and the media site .Hyakkei (Dot Hyakkei) specialized in the outdoors. It has also tried to diversify sales by partnering with camera, smartphone, and smartwatch makers.

In addition to Yamap’s user community partnering with Olympus’ open platform camera “Air A01” to develop outdoor camera accessories, Yamap also comes preinstalled on Kyocera’s smartphone Torque for the outdoors and Japan’s first domestic smartwatch WSD-F10 from Casio.

To give an idea of the number of Yamap’s users, the latest figures show that the app has been download 820,000 times with nearly 100 million monthly page views (the precise number of users is undisclosed). Leisure White Paper 2016 published by Japan Productivity Headquarters estimates there are 8.6 million mountaineers in Japan, which means slightly less than 10% of the entire population of mountaineers in Japan is using Yamap. By partnering with Ishii Sports, Yamap aims for synergy with the Ishii Sports member community which totals over 1 million.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

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Japan’s Laboratik secures $745K seed round to help companies visualize teamwork

A;
Laboratik

Takeshi Hirano 2018.04.18

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Laboratik — the Japanese startup providing insight to optimize team work through a smart bot platform called A; — announced on Monday that it has　raised 80 million yen (about $745,000) in a seed round from Archetype Ventures, Mizuho Capital, Eltes Capital, Zertoh.AI, and other angel investors. Coinciding with the latest funding, Professor Reiji Ohtaki of Waseda Business School and Hajime Hotta of Japanese AI startup Cinnamon joined Laboratik as development advisors. The company says it will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing capabilities. Laboratik was founded in July of 2015 by Toyofumi Miura who previously started out his career as a designer at R/GA New York and subsequently worked as an industry manager at Google Japan where he came up with a project regarding a new way of working. In view of adopting Google’s culture where employees are quantitatively evaluated into HR Tech, the Laboratik team was thinking to develop a product to serve crowdsourced work. They came up with “A;” as a side project in this process. Using the company’s proprietary Natural Language Processing technology, “A;” works as a chat bot for Slack to monitor conversation, analyzes the emotional…

Toyofumi Miura, Founder and CEO of Laboratik

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Laboratik — the Japanese startup providing insight to optimize team work through a smart bot platform called A; — announced on Monday that it has　raised 80 million yen (about $745,000) in a seed round from Archetype Ventures, Mizuho Capital, Eltes Capital, Zertoh.AI, and other angel investors.

Coinciding with the latest funding, Professor Reiji Ohtaki of Waseda Business School and Hajime Hotta of Japanese AI startup Cinnamon joined Laboratik as development advisors. The company says it will use the funds to strengthen their engineering and marketing capabilities.

Laboratik was founded in July of 2015 by Toyofumi Miura who previously started out his career as a designer at R/GA New York and subsequently worked as an industry manager at Google Japan where he came up with a project regarding a new way of working.

In view of adopting Google’s culture where employees are quantitatively evaluated into HR Tech, the Laboratik team was thinking to develop a product to serve crowdsourced work. They came up with “A;” as a side project in this process.

Using the company’s proprietary Natural Language Processing technology, “A;” works as a chat bot for Slack to monitor conversation, analyzes the emotional tendency and positive/negative degree of team members in the project.

In addition, the chat bot can sort conversations by the relative amount of them and topic so that, for example, it can visualizes who is in a negative state of mind or lacks communication with other members as well as proposing topics to discuss he or she is likely to be interested in. Miura plans to expand the platform into other chat tools beyond Slack in the future.

Since its closed beta launch back in February of 2017, “A;” has been used on a test basis by 800 companies in Japan and the rest of the world. Laboratik has been highly evaluated by more than a few acceleration programs such as being recently qualified for the first batch of the Plug and Play Japan accelerator. They will start charging users on an account basis but a detailed pricing plan will be announced when the service is officially launched.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Makuake, Fukuoka City join forces to help startups expand into Japan via crowdfunding

The Bridge 2018.04.12

See the original story in Japanese. Japanese major crowdfunding platform Makuake and Fukuoka, the western Japanese city known for having been designated as a special economic zone for encouraging global entrepreneurship, announced today that they will jointly help foreign startups expand into the Japanese market by helping launch their crowdfunding campaigns. Fukuoka City will help foreign startups, that have their own product, launch their crowdfunding campaign by recommending them to Makuake while the city looks to utilize existing schemes to help these startups gain funds, office locations and business opportunities. Startups having launched their crowdfunding campaign can typically enjoy the benefits of improving their public awareness and gaining necessary funds, in addition to making it easier to obtain loans on their own from financial institutions and cultivate distribution channels through user validation results. See also: Cities of Japan’s Fukuoka, Taiwan’s Taipei agree on mutual startup support initiatives Cities of Japan’s Fukuoka, France’s Bordeaux shake hands to support drone startups Makuake has dealt with more than 100 crowdfunding campaigns from foreign enterprises and startups. Meanwhile, led by its startup support arm called Global Startup Center, Fukuoka City has been focused on inviting foreign startups to set up shop there. As part…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese major crowdfunding platform Makuake and Fukuoka, the western Japanese city known for having been designated as a special economic zone for encouraging global entrepreneurship, announced today that they will jointly help foreign startups expand into the Japanese market by helping launch their crowdfunding campaigns.

Fukuoka City will help foreign startups, that have their own product, launch their crowdfunding campaign by recommending them to Makuake while the city looks to utilize existing schemes to help these startups gain funds, office locations and business opportunities. Startups having launched their crowdfunding campaign can typically enjoy the benefits of improving their public awareness and gaining necessary funds, in addition to making it easier to obtain loans on their own from financial institutions and cultivate distribution channels through user validation results.

See also:

Makuake has dealt with more than 100 crowdfunding campaigns from foreign enterprises and startups. Meanwhile, led by its startup support arm called Global Startup Center, Fukuoka City has been focused on inviting foreign startups to set up shop there.

As part of the partnership, both parties have just started helping to run two crowdfunding campaigns: Coffee Pixels – a solid coffee bar from Latvia (see this for campaign) – and Hope English – an English e-learning service from Taiwan (see this for campaign).

Celebrating its fifth year since the launch, Makuake has been cultivating potential crowdfunding projects from rural areas in Japan in partnership with regional banks. In the meantime they set up a branch office in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido last month. Through the partnership with Fukuoka City, we can expect they will further cultivate crowdfunding campaigns from Fukuoka and Kyushu regions as well as to help foreign startups gain more exposure in the Japanese market.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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