news

Japan’s JustInCase snags another seed round to launch P2P insurance for mobile repairs

Masaru Ikeda 2018.02.11

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based insuretech startup JustInCase announced on Wednesday that it has raised additional seed funding from 500 Startups Japan and Naoki Aoyagi. Aoyagi is the former CFO of Japanese internet giant Gree (TSE:3632) and now the CEO of MerPay, the financial services subsidiary of Japanese C2C commerce unicorn startup Mercari. Aoyagi participated in this round as an angel investor while 500 Startups Japan made a follow-on investment after their participation in the previous seed round. Although JustInCase has not yet clarified the amount of each individual funding, it did confirm that the cumulative funding amount including this follow-on round along with last year’s is 45 million yen (about $414K US). The company is preparing its first product “Sumaho Hoken (Smartphone Insurance)”, an insurance service to cover repair costs in the event of a malfunction for smartphone users. It uses AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns, and conducts a risk assessment for each user allowing the company to provide a service with optimum premiums. As a result, it will be cheaper than Apple Care and other major telecom carriers’ insurance fees for smartphone users. In preparation of launching the official Sumaho Hoken service,…

Front row from the left: Hiroo Koizumi (CTO, justInCase), Kazy Hata (CEO, justInCase), Shinnichi Nasukawa (CFO, justInCase)
Back row from the left: James Riney (Head, 500 Startups Japan), Naoki Aoyagi, Yohei Sawayama (Managing Partner, 500 Startups Japan)
Image credit: justInCase

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based insuretech startup JustInCase announced on Wednesday that it has raised additional seed funding from 500 Startups Japan and Naoki Aoyagi. Aoyagi is the former CFO of Japanese internet giant Gree (TSE:3632) and now the CEO of MerPay, the financial services subsidiary of Japanese C2C commerce unicorn startup Mercari. Aoyagi participated in this round as an angel investor while 500 Startups Japan made a follow-on investment after their participation in the previous seed round. Although JustInCase has not yet clarified the amount of each individual funding, it did confirm that the cumulative funding amount including this follow-on round along with last year’s is 45 million yen (about $414K US).

The company is preparing its first product “Sumaho Hoken (Smartphone Insurance)”, an insurance service to cover repair costs in the event of a malfunction for smartphone users. It uses AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns, and conducts a risk assessment for each user allowing the company to provide a service with optimum premiums. As a result, it will be cheaper than Apple Care and other major telecom carriers’ insurance fees for smartphone users.

Sumaho Hoken (Smartphone Insurance)
Image credit: JustInCase

In preparation of launching the official Sumaho Hoken service, the company is coordinating with a local bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Finance to register as a small short-term insurance company but prior to the official launch, taking advantage of the exclusion provision of the Insurance Business Law (Article 2 of the Business Law), the company began an invitation-only service for pre-registered users from Wednesday.

Upon completion of the small short-term insurance company registration, the advance service is expected to shift to an official service. Due to the restrictions of applicable laws and the like, there is a possibility that the products and insurance premium conditions of the official service will be different from those of the advance service.

Sumaho Hoken is classified as a “P2P (peer-to-peer) insurance” which applies the concept of a sharing economy to insurance, i.e. friends and groups of users (pools) who are interested in insurance against the same risk pay the insurance premiums, and a system is adopted whereby insurance money is paid out from this pool. P2P insurance has various merits including the risk being easier to calculate compared with conventional insurance, insurance products that were impossible in the past can be easily developed, insurance money fraud and moral hazard problems are less likely to occur, and ex-post facto premiums can be kept cheap (through cash back, etc.).

In this space, we’ve seen emerging P2P insurance startups such as Sure (having raised $10.6M US so far), Lemonade (recently raised $120M US from Softbank, GV or Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Allianz last yearend), and Berlin-based Friendsurance (raised more than $15M US from Horizon Ventures, the investment firm of Hong Kong biliionaire Li Ka-Shing.

Translated by Amanda Amasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

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Japanese hottest unicorn Mercari expands AI research with Sharp and academia leaders

Mercari

The Bridge 2018.01.08

See the original story in Japanese. Japan’s Mercari, providing the peer-to-peer marketplace app under the same name, announced in December that it has established Mercari R4D, a Research & Development organization with the aim to deploy emerging technologies to the society. Toshiya Kimura, Manager of Engineering Department at Mercari, was appointed the head of the new initiative. The name R4D stands for ‘Research for Development, Design, Deployment and Disruption.’ Mercari has been utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technologies so far, and the firm will begin projects for social deployment and commercialization of these technologies in cooperation with other enterprises or educational organizations through the initiative. At this time, eight research themes jointly with Sharp and university laboratories have already been chosen, as follows: Communications with multiple locations utilizing 8K TVs with Corporate R&D Business Unit, Sharp Outletless office with wireless power feed system with Kawahara Lab, The University of Tokyo Deep Hashing Network for similar image search with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University 3D form estimation from product image posted on the marketplace with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University Background auto-specification from product image with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University Trust framework using blockchain with Keio University Internet of Things ecosystem…

Mercari CEO Shintaro Yamada introduces in-house AI research initiative Mercari R4D
Image credit: Sekiko Suzuki/The Bridge

See the original story in Japanese.

Japan’s Mercari, providing the peer-to-peer marketplace app under the same name, announced in December that it has established Mercari R4D, a Research & Development organization with the aim to deploy emerging technologies to the society. Toshiya Kimura, Manager of Engineering Department at Mercari, was appointed the head of the new initiative.

The name R4D stands for ‘Research for Development, Design, Deployment and Disruption.’ Mercari has been utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technologies so far, and the firm will begin projects for social deployment and commercialization of these technologies in cooperation with other enterprises or educational organizations through the initiative. At this time, eight research themes jointly with Sharp and university laboratories have already been chosen, as follows:

Communications with multiple locations utilizing 8K TVs with Corporate R&D Business Unit, Sharp
Outletless office with wireless power feed system with Kawahara Lab, The University of Tokyo
Deep Hashing Network for similar image search with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University
3D form estimation from product image posted on the marketplace with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University
Background auto-specification from product image with Ochiai Lab, Tsukuba University
Trust framework using blockchain with Keio University
Internet of Things ecosystem with Cross-tech Design Lab, Kyoto University of Art & Design
Application of quantum annealing technology to art field with Ohzeki Lab, Tohoku University

According to Mercari CEO Shintaro Yamada, the investment amount to these research activities has not been clearly set yet, but it will be at several hundred millions of yen (several millions of dollars)-scale next year. The research themes are chosen from mid-to long-term plans requiring 3 to 5 years, as well as ones utilizing IoT or blockchain technologies having application possibility of social infrastructure.

Research is already being undertaken in the above eight themes and more themes will possibly be added. The commercialization and deployment of research results may be brought about as a Mercari product in the future. Yamada explains the background to the foundation of R4D:

Mercari achieved 100 million downloads just the other day. Meanwhile, we have implemented the wrongful exhibit detection system utilizing AI technology or the auto-estimation of weight of items to the app for the U.S.. One of our purposes is to differentiate the app by technologies through R&D.

The firm plans to enhance its engineer structure to 1000-staffer organization from current 100-staffer one. In addition, it started establishment of an organization capable of scaling by micronizing each function. Kimura explains the firm’s future vision:

As Fujifilm engaged in development of cosmetics, we may start different business in the future and are considering how to make good use of our owned technologies.

As the Japanese artist Sputniko!, a renowned British/Japanese artist and designer, who joined the team as Senior Producer, various direction of deployment can be seen, for example utilizing technologies which are hard to deploy immediately into a form of design or art. The firm focuses on research as well as commercialization and visualization of technology jointly with external research organizations.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Japanese startup unveils AI-powered rule sets solution to secure AWS-hosted websites

Masaru Ikeda 2017.12.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Cyber Security Cloud, the Japanese startup behind a cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) called Kogeki Shadan-kun, unveiled a new product called WafCharm earlier this month. WafCharm uses artificial intelligence to automatically apply a WAF signature (rule set) setting for websites hosted on Amazon Web Services. It can be used for free until the end of January 2018. By introducing WafCharm, the information systems division of a company operating a cloud-based web server on AWS can automate the complicated tasks of selecting and applying optimal signatures for defense against attacks. Typical WAF systems can be categorized into software-based, appliance-based, and cloud-based ones. Cyber Security Cloud has been specialized in developing cloud-based WAF solutions to secure cloud-based web servers, launched Kogeki Shadan-kun in December of 2013. Since then, the service has seen a steady increase in clients, including NTT Docomo, ANA (All Nippon Airways), and SBI Securities, and has been adopted by 4,000 websites in about three and a half years since the launch. The monthly report that the dashboard outputs can be easily used for meetings within a company, and in the event of damage, insurance of up to 10 million yen (about $88.2K…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Cyber Security Cloud, the Japanese startup behind a cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) called Kogeki Shadan-kun, unveiled a new product called WafCharm earlier this month. WafCharm uses artificial intelligence to automatically apply a WAF signature (rule set) setting for websites hosted on Amazon Web Services. It can be used for free until the end of January 2018. By introducing WafCharm, the information systems division of a company operating a cloud-based web server on AWS can automate the complicated tasks of selecting and applying optimal signatures for defense against attacks.

Typical WAF systems can be categorized into software-based, appliance-based, and cloud-based ones. Cyber Security Cloud has been specialized in developing cloud-based WAF solutions to secure cloud-based web servers, launched Kogeki Shadan-kun in December of 2013. Since then, the service has seen a steady increase in clients, including NTT Docomo, ANA (All Nippon Airways), and SBI Securities, and has been adopted by 4,000 websites in about three and a half years since the launch. The monthly report that the dashboard outputs can be easily used for meetings within a company, and in the event of damage, insurance of up to 10 million yen (about $88.2K US) is accompanied (for the moment, there have been no applicable cases). The fact that compensation of up to 10 million yen can be granted may also be a factor in the growth of the company.

The dashboard for “Kougeki Shadan-kun”
Image credit: Cyber Security Cloud

Cyber Security Cloud collects tendencies of web attacks and security defense from Kougeki Shadan-Kun, and based on the findings obtained, then WafCharm applies optimal rule sets to user instances leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). The application of rule sets according to the software stack, supporting the OWASP Top 10 security risks, and the speedy addition of new rule sets in response to new weaknesses are all automatically done for user instances on AWS.

AWS also provides 11 rule sets by five security vendors (as of December, 2017) as WAF Managed Rules. This is intended to make it easier to operate even for users less familiar with security measures while customized setting is difficult because detailed settings are black-boxed. Having said that, it is a painstaking task to manually set rule sets one by one. WafCharm aims at solving this pain point.

Cyber Security Cloud CEO Hikaru Ono says:

AWS has 34% market share in the global cloud user base. To reach one-third of all cloud users (by offering the WAF optimization service for AWS) would be a great opportunity. I think that WafCharm could set these cloud users free from security risks.

In 2016, two years after the service launch, Kougeki Shadan-kun won the largest share in the cloud-based WAF market in Japan. By introducing the new product WafCharm, Cyber Security Cloud has its sights set on the number one position in the global automated WAF operation sector. As a short-term goal the company is looking to sign with 10,000 companies in 2018. While looking at future user trends, it is also considering deploying services to other cloud platforms such as GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and Microsoft Azure.

Cyber Security Cloud was established in August of 2010 (under the name of Amitie). The company raised around 100 million yen (about $883K US) from Ambition, Legend Partners, Epsilon Group, Real World, SBI Investment and other investors in January of 2016.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Japan’s Cognitee raises $1.3M to help firms analyze and visualize employees sales pitch

Cognitee

Masaru Ikeda 2017.12.28

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Cognitee announced last week that it had raised 150 million yen (about $1.3 million) in its pre-series B round. The lead investor was Global Brain this time and Mitsui Fudosan (TSE:8801) joined anew as an investor. This follows their series A round conducted in 2016 having investors including Global Brain, Alps Electric, beBit UCD Ventures, Glocalink (affiliated by Leave a Nest), Active and Company, plus SMBC-VC. Cognitee has fundraised 280 million yen (about $2.5 million) in total since its angel round. With this investment, the firm will strengthen its organization system by hiring additional core members and prepare for overseas development which will take place next year and beyond. Additionally, the firm announced it invited Kazuhiro Kondo as COO; he has careers as Corporate Officer of DeNA and VP of DeNA West (subsidiary of DeNA covering the West) after serving Sony, Sony Ericsson and DeNA where he engaged in development of social game platform. Visualization of communication Cognitee was founded in 2013 by CEO Rie Kawano who formerly worked at business strategy department in Sony or DeNA and also experienced startup in her university days. The firm develops and provides UpSighter, enabling employee…

L to R: Cognitee CEO Rie Kawano, COO Kazuhiro Kondo
Image credit: Cognitee

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Cognitee announced last week that it had raised 150 million yen (about $1.3 million) in its pre-series B round. The lead investor was Global Brain this time and Mitsui Fudosan (TSE:8801) joined anew as an investor. This follows their series A round conducted in 2016 having investors including Global Brain, Alps Electric, beBit UCD Ventures, Glocalink (affiliated by Leave a Nest), Active and Company, plus SMBC-VC.

Cognitee has fundraised 280 million yen (about $2.5 million) in total since its angel round. With this investment, the firm will strengthen its organization system by hiring additional core members and prepare for overseas development which will take place next year and beyond. Additionally, the firm announced it invited Kazuhiro Kondo as COO; he has careers as Corporate Officer of DeNA and VP of DeNA West (subsidiary of DeNA covering the West) after serving Sony, Sony Ericsson and DeNA where he engaged in development of social game platform.

Visualization of communication

Cognitee was founded in 2013 by CEO Rie Kawano who formerly worked at business strategy department in Sony or DeNA and also experienced startup in her university days. The firm develops and provides UpSighter, enabling employee training / monitoring excluding cognitive bias targeting enterprise users. The service offers easier communication methods for conveying meaning by analyzing and digitizing speech, sales talk or presentation. Kawano demonstrated the service:

For example, we picked up five Steve Jobs’ speeches and five Japanese politicians’ speeches and then calculated the mean number of topics incorporated into these speeches. In the Jobs’ speeches, topics referring the background of the launch or the reason for the size of the product accounted for 40% of the whole story. On the other hand, as you can see, each politician made mentions of some different topic in one speech and it includes too many content.

Cognitee had initially tackled ‘visualization of thinking’ through a provision of services for meeting efficacy improvement / brainstorming support / planning correction. However, the firm pivoted its approach later; with the basic concept as it was, it changed the application field to ‘visualization of communication’ and then succeeded in gaining strong supports from major enterprises that conventionally had to depend on external consultants for human resource development such as training of salespersons.

Kouno continued:

Taking pharmaceutical companies as an example, MRs (medical representatives) have to learn about clinical trial data and give presentation to doctors to sell new drugs. You may think they should show a larger amount of data, but too much data will not result in good sales. Our analysis revealed that the MRs who spare much time to present specific data about efficacy, benefit and especially risk of the drug are more likely to be in the high-ranking group.

The same can be said of settlement negotiation with non-life insurance companies. UpSighter figures out modeling of communication style that leads to good negotiation. By applying it to each practical negotiation case and distributing assessment sheets, staffers in charge of these cases can compare their own methods with the model case. For enterprises, operation improvement can be achieved without requiring instructions cost.

Implementation of UpSighter will benefit enterprises in reduction of instructions cost, as well as the fact that each staff can grasp unnecessary / insufficient factors in his / her own speeches quantitatively. The Cognitee team consists of several members including Kawano and Kondo, and they do not carry out outbound marketing so actively but often receive inquiries from top executives of major enterprises who intend bottom-up of internal human resources.

Pursuing scalability without AI

Part of Output sample of UpSighter
Image credit: Cognitee

The firm’s name ‘Cognitee’ and its service contents — analysis / digitization of speech is somehow associated with artificial intelligence (AI), but no general AI is used in UpSighter services at this time.All processes required for the service provision of UpSighter are contributed by 150 remote workers in and out of Japan. They carry on transcription of speech, subdividing of the contents, and analysis / evaluation of subordinate relationship of the contents. It is like a form of Factory Automation (FA) for intelligent labor driven by Internet; by dividing its process thoroughly and assigning each small process unit to individual workers, the factory-like quality control and production management is realized.

In the process from original speech content (the input) to analyzed / digitized assessment sheet (the output), more than 10 remote workers relay intermediate products in succession. A worker understands what to do with his / her own task but does not need to have knowledge about the other tasks. With this system, UpSighter needs no consultants with specialized knowledge but can leave all works to housewife workers who passed the test after one-month training.

Kouno said:

We did not even know what tendency exists until we stored data about 1,500 matters. However, the details of analysis gradually dawned on us and we have been applying patents relating to our rule or framework in Japan, the U.S and EU countries.

Kondo added:

Typical AI learning require Big Data. Moreover, I think it is impossible to trust what human does not understand to AI.

As AI is applied to everything these days, the firm’s approach appears quite fresh. Even AI takes certain cost and time for implementing or tuning, and above all, training data is necessary. UpSighter can extract model case if only it has data about three cases (for example, speeches by three high-achieving salespersons) no matter what kind of business type / condition they are, and assess other speeches based on it.

In general, it is difficult to secure scalability in tasks depending on the person, but there is no limit on the business development of UpSighter which implemented the concepts of FA or remote workers in its work process. As a larger amount of data is accumulated, the Cognitee can replace from man to AI in some process units partially as needed.

Currently, UpSighter is mainly used in sales department that tends to invest a large amount of budget into human resource development in enterprise, but the firm will positively explore the possibility of application or implementation into other departments in the future.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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2018 predictions from insightful international investors

Rude VC Predictions

The Bridge 2017.12.22

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). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here. Years ago I started publishing an annual list of technology predictions from global venture capitalists. By design, I deliberately chose VCs beyond the usual American household names, whose voices were not necessarily heard on the world stage. Last year all of the tech prognostications came from women VCs. Even (especially?) by Silicon Valley standards, this felt quite unique and I’m proud of that. For this season’s set of predictions, I am again pleased to be able to give the floor to an all-female cast of investors, this time a collection of insightful VCs from Asia. I’ve had the honour of interacting with each of these individuals and encourage all readers to take note of them. Their already noteworthy accomplishments will likely continue to grow. May 2018 bring us further enlightenment. Happy holidays! Kanako Honda –…

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). You can read more on his blog at http://rude.vc or follow him @markbivens. The Japanese translation of this article is available here.

Years ago I started publishing an annual list of technology predictions from global venture capitalists. By design, I deliberately chose VCs beyond the usual American household names, whose voices were not necessarily heard on the world stage.

Last year all of the tech prognostications came from women VCs. Even (especially?) by Silicon Valley standards, this felt quite unique and I’m proud of that.

For this season’s set of predictions, I am again pleased to be able to give the floor to an all-female cast of investors, this time a collection of insightful VCs from Asia. I’ve had the honour of interacting with each of these individuals and encourage all readers to take note of them. Their already noteworthy accomplishments will likely continue to grow.
May 2018 bring us further enlightenment. Happy holidays!

Kanako Honda – DCM Ventures, Japan

From a high-level perspective, data analytics combined with delivering value proposition that will ultimately result in monetization will become even more important in 2018. In the recent 1-2 years, startups were able to gather large funds from VCs and concentrated on growing the user base by putting short term economics aside. As these startups, such as Uber, LimeBike, Wework etc, successfully built sizable audience and became a platform, there will be companies that will utilize big startup’s network effect and deliver various values to each touchpoint and create monetization model that doesn’t require large funding.

From a geopolitical view, edtech in Japan will start to rise as education is becoming one of the hottest topic of national policy. Although edtech has been considered as a niche, slow and unprofitable market for startups to jump in for quite a while, companies are starting to learn from the past and coming up with ways to build sustainable business within this sector. I hope 2018 will be the dawn of edtech era in Japan.

Vorawan “Michelle” Wangpanitkul – Digital Ventures, Thailand

I recall 2016 being at the height of the blockchain buzz. Blockchain pretty much intercepted every use case in and out of fintech. While I am a big believer in blockchain, I believe there will only be a few blockchain-powered use cases that survive to commercialization, ones that require an immutable distributed ledger to tackle its pain point (and there aren’t many!).

Beyond payments & remittance, the next one should be KYC. Identity is at the foundation of banking, and getting it right is crucial and win-win for everyone. I personally think blockchain-powered KYC is an agenda that regulators need to push forward, and with Singapore and India’s regulators already testing this, 2018 might be the year blockchain-KYC gets adopted mainstream, and other regulators follow in.

Geographically speaking, I think there will be a lot of interesting things coming out of India. RBI has pushed forward e-KYC and successfully captured biometrics data in 99% of its adult population. With a 1.3billion population, fragmented market, huge engineering talent pool, and a lot of financial & infrastructural barriers being tackled at a state level, India is the country ripe for innovation and transformation. My 2018 prediction – lots of capital flooding into India.

Joanna Cheung – HBCC Investment and TUS International, China

The paradigm will continue to shift from ‘made in China’ to ‘created in China’. The giants of innovative technology that are emerging today are original Chinese innovations. Increasingly, we will see these original and successful companies expand abroad, notably to the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Innovations in deep tech, such as artificial intelligence, clean technology, robotics, RPA, are areas we’re particularly excited about.

Mayu Morishima – Beyond Next Ventures, Japan

In Japan, more attention is being paid to technology-centric startups originating from startups, centered on the biotechnology and medical sectors thanks to government-backed initiatives. Meanwhile, due to the global trend of personalized medicine, the mainstream of technology development is expected to shift to startups which can adapt quickly to new circumstances. In addition, we are seeing the trend that (non-healthcare) enterprises enter the healthcare sector to acquire innovation from the outside. In light of all these findings, we can expect technology-centric startups centered on biotechnology, healthcare and medical device sectors will remain hot in the future.

Particularly in Japan, trending sectors will include regenerative medicine such as iPS cell research, digital health where therapeutic apps based on medical evidence are emerging to the market while telemedicine businesses are more active prior to the planned revision of the Japanese medical payment system in FY2018. However, I believe that one of the best thrills of VC investments is to create the next trends by investing in heretic technologies which are too new for us to know how to call them. Therefore, I expect innovations that do not belong to any sector in 2018.

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Japan’s Factbase unveils cryptocurrency market forecast platform at Blockchain Expo

Factbase

Masaru Ikeda 2017.12.06

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-basedFactbase announced a cryptocurrency-focused market forecast platform called Signal at Blockchain Expo, which just finished in Santa Clara, US last week. Coinciding with this announcement, the company began accepting pre-registration for use of the service. Factbase was founded in November by Osaka University alumni Yusuke Takahashi and other members. The team recognized that distribution flow of news updates and other elements likely to produce price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies are totally different from those for legal currencies. The Signal platform provides two functions: a web-based dashboard called Signal Board offering market forecast and analysis, and a notification service called Signal Alerts which lets users know via the LINE messaging app when an event likely to greatly impact price fluctuation of a cryptocurrency occurs. Takahashi explained: For example, presidents of Bank of Japan never tweet about banking policy or strategy. In contrast, information distributed online is likely to reflect price fluctuation of cryptocurrecies, and the information flow of it is also unique. Most of this kind of information is publicly available online, which usually gets bigger and bigger thorugh communities of mining users and others, and eventually snowball into big news with huge impact. […] Hence,…

CEO Yusuke Takahashi stands in the center of the Factbase team.
Image credit: Factbase

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-basedFactbase announced a cryptocurrency-focused market forecast platform called Signal at Blockchain Expo, which just finished in Santa Clara, US last week. Coinciding with this announcement, the company began accepting pre-registration for use of the service.

Factbase was founded in November by Osaka University alumni Yusuke Takahashi and other members. The team recognized that distribution flow of news updates and other elements likely to produce price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies are totally different from those for legal currencies. The Signal platform provides two functions: a web-based dashboard called Signal Board offering market forecast and analysis, and a notification service called Signal Alerts which lets users know via the LINE messaging app when an event likely to greatly impact price fluctuation of a cryptocurrency occurs.

Takahashi explained:

For example, presidents of Bank of Japan never tweet about banking policy or strategy. In contrast, information distributed online is likely to reflect price fluctuation of cryptocurrecies, and the information flow of it is also unique. Most of this kind of information is publicly available online, which usually gets bigger and bigger thorugh communities of mining users and others, and eventually snowball into big news with huge impact. […]

Hence, anyone can gain access to information resources which may alter the trend of cryptocurrencies, but it’s hard to organize this kind of information and understand its context because of too much miscellaneous information being included. The Signal platform leverages big data and artificial intelligence to help users organize it and understand the context more accurately.

Factbase CEO Yusuke Takahashi presents the Signal platform at Blockchain Expo
Image credit: Factbase

The Factbase team demos the Signal platform in their booth at Blockchain Expo.
Image credit: Factbase

In view of other areas where publicly disclosed information is likely to alter market trends, when a listed company announces their financial statement, hedge funds and institutional investors first sell or buy the company’s shares based on it, and then individual investors follow, which eventually leads to price fluctuations for the market.

In contrast to legal currencies or stock prices, not only the mechanisms behind securing values but also those leading to price fluctuations have become decentralized for cryptocurrencies. For cryptocurrency investors, keeping their eyes on announcements from Federal Reserve Bank or Bank of Japan by watching CNBC or reading the Nikkei would not suffice upon catching market trends. It is here the Signal platform can create a niche opportunity that can provide investors a new value.

Screenshots of Signal Board
Image credit: Factbase

The Signal platform curates timelines and posts by crawling Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, GitHub and other websites, and analyzes them from different viewpoints using Natural Language Processing to see whether each article has a positive or negative context. They will initially start with Bitcoin out of many cryptocurrency options. Generally speaking, it’s difficult to distinguish between news updates on Bitcoin and those on Bitcoin Cash, but we were told that the company’s technology can realize it by leveraging their proprietary algorithm.

We are currently focused on curating, organizing and analyzing information. We are planning to start publishing reports in partnership with cryptocurrency-focused market analysts. In addition, we intend to publish a sort of “Cryptocurrency market index” based on calculation using our proprietary algorithm. […]

Our mission is to offer optimized collecting information on cryptocurrency investment by forecasting a fluctuation in prices.

A screenshot of Signal Alert
Image credit: Factbase

Going forward the company plans to introduce a so-called “development index” for every cryptocurrency. Since the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies is a real mix of wheat and chaff, these indexes will help cryptocyrrency investors understand, for example, which ICO (initial coin offering) campaigns are well organized or plain irresponsible. The team aims to acquire a million users in two years from now, planning to expand the service into English and Korean languages.

Factbase has secured a seed funding from multiple unnamed angel investors. Takahashi says the company is hiring data analysts, data scientists and “engineers who are likely to feel ecstasy upon collecting information” for further service development of the platform.

Translated by “Tex” Pomeroy

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Japan’s JustInCase to launch AI-powered repair cost insurance for smartphone users

Masaru Ikeda 2017.11.29

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based InsurTech startup JustInCase announced last week that it had fundraised from 500 Startups Japan in a seed round. The raised amount was not disclosed but is estimated to be a few hundred thousand dollars. justInCase was founded in 2016 by Kazuya Hata (CEO) who had served the leading actuary consultancy Milliman and has been providing risk management services such as Asset Liability Management (ALM) to insurance companies, Hiroo Koizumi (CTO) who had engaged in modeling / data analysis of assets and liabilities, Shinichi Nasukawa (CFO) who had been involved in development of advertisement business platform at an ad agency as a data scientist and others. The team consists of technology-driven members as CEO and CFO that have engineering background, in addition to CTO. Smartphone Insurance — justInCase’s first product planned for launch soon — is a repair cost insurance service for smartphones. By analyzing users’ activity patterns with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm and evaluating risk for each user, it provides insurance service with optimized fee. With this method, the firm realizes a cheaper service than AppleCare or ones provided by major carriers to smartphone users. Since this field is a niche market which…

(From L to R) Yohei Sawayama (Managing Partner, 500 Startups Japan), Nakamura Takuo (SEO Engineer, JustInCase), Shinichi Nasukawa (CFO, JustInCase), Kazuya Hata (CEO, JustInCase), Hiroo Koizumi (CTO, JustInCase), Kuniyuki Iizawa (Designer, JustInCase), James Riney (Managing Partner, 500 Startups Japan)
Image credit: JustInCase

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based InsurTech startup JustInCase announced last week that it had fundraised from 500 Startups Japan in a seed round. The raised amount was not disclosed but is estimated to be a few hundred thousand dollars.

justInCase was founded in 2016 by Kazuya Hata (CEO) who had served the leading actuary consultancy Milliman and has been providing risk management services such as Asset Liability Management (ALM) to insurance companies, Hiroo Koizumi (CTO) who had engaged in modeling / data analysis of assets and liabilities, Shinichi Nasukawa (CFO) who had been involved in development of advertisement business platform at an ad agency as a data scientist and others. The team consists of technology-driven members as CEO and CFO that have engineering background, in addition to CTO.

Smartphone Insurance
Image credit: JustInCase

Smartphone Insurance — justInCase’s first product planned for launch soon — is a repair cost insurance service for smartphones. By analyzing users’ activity patterns with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm and evaluating risk for each user, it provides insurance service with optimized fee. With this method, the firm realizes a cheaper service than AppleCare or ones provided by major carriers to smartphone users.

Since this field is a niche market which major insurance companies do not deal with, it is possible to generate new insurance demand and to establish cooperative relationships with conventional players. justInCase has been coordinating activities with the Kanto Local Finance Bureau in order to be registered as a small amounts and short term insurance provider, and plans an official launch of the service within 2018. Furthermore, it started accepting user pre-registrations on its website from the day.

While the details about Smartphone Insurance have not been revealed yet, it is thought to be an app capable of self-diagnosis when insuring /claiming insurance in addition to carrying out user activity analysis like Sure, a similar service in the US. The Sure team behind the service is in its third year since its foundation and had raised $10.6 million in total including the series A round fundraising conducted this year.

As to same kinds of on-demand insurances for individuals in Japan, Warrantee launched Warrantee Now this month and Trov is expected to enter the Japanese market, although AI algorithm is not used in the calculation of insurance fee of these services.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Ascent Robotics unveils AI training platform, aiming for level 4 autonomous drive by 2020

Masaru Ikeda 2017.11.27

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Ascent Robotics has been developing autonomous driving software for Level 4 capable-vehicle (fully autonomous driving including steering, accelerating and braking without human input) in the Japanese road environment. The firm launched a beta version of AI (Artificial Intelligence) learning environment named Atlas last week. Atlas is a learning environment for AI used in simulator-based vehicle / robot, integrating VR (Virtual Reality) human interface and 3D simulation environment, in addition to deep reinforcement learning algorithm. By using both real and pseudo data for learning AI, the learning efficiency is increased to more than 50 times compared to that when using only real data. Utilizing the superiority of Atlas, Ascent Robotics aims the realization of Level 4 autonomy by 2020 when market competition is expected to be intensified. Since the Japanese or Asian road environment is considerably different from Western ones that DeepMind, Waymo, and Uber deal with, Ascent Robotics focuses on the Level 4 autonomy applicable for narrow streets having much traffic as the conventional Japanese streets normally have, and the team expects to lead the global market in this field. Ascent Robotics was founded in September 2016 by Fred Almeida, the Canadian engineer…

Autonomous vehicle developed with Ascent Robotics’ technology (concept image)
Image credit: Ascent Robotics

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Ascent Robotics has been developing autonomous driving software for Level 4 capable-vehicle (fully autonomous driving including steering, accelerating and braking without human input) in the Japanese road environment. The firm launched a beta version of AI (Artificial Intelligence) learning environment named Atlas last week.

Atlas is a learning environment for AI used in simulator-based vehicle / robot, integrating VR (Virtual Reality) human interface and 3D simulation environment, in addition to deep reinforcement learning algorithm. By using both real and pseudo data for learning AI, the learning efficiency is increased to more than 50 times compared to that when using only real data.

Utilizing the superiority of Atlas, Ascent Robotics aims the realization of Level 4 autonomy by 2020 when market competition is expected to be intensified. Since the Japanese or Asian road environment is considerably different from Western ones that DeepMind, Waymo, and Uber deal with, Ascent Robotics focuses on the Level 4 autonomy applicable for narrow streets having much traffic as the conventional Japanese streets normally have, and the team expects to lead the global market in this field.

Learning AI for autonomous driving in Atlas 3D simulator space
Image credit: Ascent Robotics

Ascent Robotics was founded in September 2016 by Fred Almeida, the Canadian engineer who had successively held high-level positions in Salesforce and Pasona Tquila. According to Nikkei Robotics, the firm has already concluded a business contract with one of the major Japanese automakers. Ken Kutaragi, known as the father of PlayStation, has also joined the firm as Outside Director.

Looking at the trend of the major Japanese automakers, Toyota, Mazda, Honda and others have targeted about 2025 as the goal for establishment of level 4 autonomous technology. If the practical application of Ascent Robotics’ technology is realized, schedules of the major automakers’ research and development may be pushed forward a few years and more.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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report

Tokyu railway’s 3rd accelerator program showcases 6 startups to collaborate with

Masaru Ikeda 2017.11.25

See the original story in Japanese. Japanese railway company Tokyu (TSE:9005) held a Demo Day of its startups accelerator Tokyu Accelerator Program 3rd batch in October in Tokyo. In this finals pitch, six teams as finalists plus six teams selected as excellent services gave Lightning Talks. Tokyu Accelerator Program has a feature of giving opportunities for test marketing to participant startups by utilizing Tokyu Group’s resources. Last year’s 2nd batch was managed by Tokyu, Spiral Ventures (ex. IMJ Investment Partners), Connected Design and Tokyo Agency, and from this batch, Tokyu Media Communications, Tokyu Recreation, Tokyu Sports System plus Tokyu Research Institute had newly joined the management. The program collected participants in 10 areas: transportation / urban development / lifestyle and service / advertisement and promotion / IoT (Internet of Things) smart home / inbound travel / entertainment / sports / healthcare / direct marketing. 28 teams had passed through interview process from among 138 applicants, and six teams remained as finalists. The six finalists had taken part in the program over five months from the kick-off of 3rd batch this April until this day. They will spend all of 2017 for brush up of their services, in order to commence…

See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese railway company Tokyu (TSE:9005) held a Demo Day of its startups accelerator Tokyu Accelerator Program 3rd batch in October in Tokyo. In this finals pitch, six teams as finalists plus six teams selected as excellent services gave Lightning Talks.

Tokyu Accelerator Program has a feature of giving opportunities for test marketing to participant startups by utilizing Tokyu Group’s resources. Last year’s 2nd batch was managed by Tokyu, Spiral Ventures (ex. IMJ Investment Partners), Connected Design and Tokyo Agency, and from this batch, Tokyu Media Communications, Tokyu Recreation, Tokyu Sports System plus Tokyu Research Institute had newly joined the management.

The program collected participants in 10 areas: transportation / urban development / lifestyle and service / advertisement and promotion / IoT (Internet of Things) smart home / inbound travel / entertainment / sports / healthcare / direct marketing. 28 teams had passed through interview process from among 138 applicants, and six teams remained as finalists.

The six finalists had taken part in the program over five months from the kick-off of 3rd batch this April until this day. They will spend all of 2017 for brush up of their services, in order to commence full-scale marketing from January of 2018 with Tokyu Group’s support.

In the event, all teams were examined by four items of novelty / affinity / potential growth / feasibility. The reviewers were as follows:

Toshihisa Adachi (Special Advisor, Japan Venture Capital Association)
Yuma Saito (General Manager, Deloitte Tohmatsu Venture Support)
Yuji Horiguchi (CEO / Partner, Spiral Ventures)
Toshiyuki Ichiki (Managing Director / Manager of Lifestyle and Service Business, Tokyu)
Isao Watanabe (Senior Managing Director, Tokyu) – chief reviewer

Tokyu Award: WAmazing by WAmazing

Prize money: 1.09 million yen (about $9,600)

WAmazing is an information portal for foreign visitors to Japan through use of free SIM cards. The team had won B Dash Camp 2017 Spring in Fukuoka.

WAmazing has so far set up vending machines to provide free SIM cards at Narita International Airport, Chubu Centrair International Airport and Kansai Airport, and will next month add Sendai International Airport to where their operation is entrusted to Tokyu Group. The team regards Hong Kong and Taiwan as its first targeting market to reach and also plans to advance into mainland China next year. The number of installed SIM cards exceeded 50,000 as of this October and is expected to surpass 150,000 by next March.

The team defines Tokyu’s commutation ticket users as “railway customers” being involved in transportation / shopping / residence along Tokyu railway, and said it aims to turn visitors to Japan using WAmazing SIM card into new railway customers through cooperation with Tokyu Group.

See also:

Shibuya Award: Minchalle by A10lab

Prize money: 428,000 yen (about $3,800)

A10 Lab provides an app Minchalle that motivates those who are prone to drop out from various activities. The app allows users to anonymously cheer up each others with the same challenges to improve themselves such as diet, rising early or training muscles. It encourages them to become habituated with team chat and photo sharing which certifies achievement of their goals.

The mean success rate of habituation with Minchalle is 69% which is eight times higher than the one by single challenge, and the app shows a high continuous use ratio at 46% a half year after the date of starting use. The team monetizes the app by B2B (business-to-business), charging for advertisement or official habituation support, and B2C (business-to-customer) charging for additional / premium functions.

The team had been born out from Sony’s Seed Acceleration Program and fundraised 66 million yen (about $580,000) from Sony, Dai-ichi Kangyo Credit Cooperative, Future Venture Capital, Globe Advisors and Yukihiro Yoshida in its seed round. It was chosen to the acceleration program of Aoyama Startup Acceleration Center (ASAC) 4th batch and the Nomura Holdings’ accelerator program Voyager 1st batch, in addition to Incubate Camp 10th.

NewWork Award: Player! by ookami

Supplemental prize: use rights of the Tokyu’s shared office network NewWork for four members

Ookami provides a sports social app Player! enabling more entertaining sports game watching utilizing online community. It is specified as a stealth matter so that the details of its service revealed in the Demo Day cannot be disclosed in this article.

See also:

NewWork Award: Ecbo Cloak by Ecbo

Supplemental prize: use rights of the Tokyu’s share office network NewWork for four members

Ecbo had not participated in the 3rd batch but gave a Lightning Talk. The details of its service are omitted here.

See also:

Too early for check-in? No worry, Tokyo cafes offering ‘Airbnb of baggage storage’

Silent Log Analytics by Rei Frontier

Rei Frontier provides a marketing service called Silent Log Analytics enabling a new type of activity analysis by analyzing customers’ location information with artificial intelligence (AI). Companies want to know about customers and customers want companies to make optimized proposal for each, but in reality, sometimes the problem occurs where products that were purchased offline are recommended online.

To solve this, Silent Log Analytics acquires 37,000 users’ activity data per day, obtaining their consent. Using smartphone-mounted GPS and sensors, it determines users’ condition or social attribute. Rei Frontier gathers information and owns the accumulated knowledge that only requires 3% power consumption. The team aims to optimize recommendation or customer notification by not sending entertainment information during work or not sending business information after work.

Through cooperation with Tokyu Card, the team proposed an analysis system for relationship between users’ activity and credit card use history by providing its auto-diary function. It also said it can notify the condition of each user’s destination in advance based on location and activity information, and can promote the optimized activity. With Tokyu Bus, the team showed a plan of promotion / effect measurement for Bus-mo! (free ride campaign of Tokyu Bus) users having similar background by jointly analyzing the users’ activity.

Futakotamagawa Award: Full Dive Novel by My Dearest

Prize money: 250,000 yen (about $2,500)

Full Dive Novel provides a virtual experience of becoming a hero of the story to users who read novels in virtual reality (VR) space. My Dearest has an advantage of making story nature-rich VR contents such as novels or videos by gathering editors and creators, while many of the VR content include games lacking good yarns. The team takes on creation / sales of its own content at first, and aims to make a universal developer kit enabling users to create VR content themselves and construct a platform capable of trading content in the future.

In Japan, with the low penetration rate of VR hardware, My Dearest proposed an expansion of location VR through cooperation with Tokyu Recreation. It emphasized the provision of location VR especially for nerdettes, and will consider optimized content / use time for females through test-marketing at 109 Cinemas in Tokyo. In addition, the team implied a possibility of making VR content featuring areas around Tokyu railway lines.

Switch Office by Hitokara Media

Hitokara Media provides an office relocation support Switch Office that matches persons moving into / out of fully-furnished offices. With this platform, users can drastically reduce restitution cost / interior arrangement costs during office relocation. Company users who want to move out leaving all furnishings behind may apply for Switch Office with the current offices’ information while company users who want to move in are examined and will be allowed to check / inquire / view privately the office.

As for cooperation with Tokyu, Hitokara Media proposes a realization of closer environment for offices and residences. If offices could be established in urban residential areas such as Sangenjaya or Musashi Kosugi, various merits would be generated for companies, employees and Tokyu’s rail operations. The team exhibited office leasing plans utilizing real estate asset along Tokyu railway lines combining Hitokara Media’s office production know-how targeting startups, for example, by leasing a station-front property near academic institutions, availing an office environment where companies can easily attract interns and part-timers may be expected.

Translated by Taijiro Takeda
Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

news

Japan’s Neurospace raises $890K to help enterprises improve employees’ sleep health

Neurospace

Masaru Ikeda 2017.10.18

See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Neurospace, the Japanese startup developing a program to improve sleep quality for large companies, revealed that it has raised 100 million yen (about $890,000 ) from Real Tech Fund, the investment fund by Euglena, SMBC Nikko, and Leave a Nest Capital. For Neurospace, it follows funds raised from Slogan Coent and individual investors in July 2015 and from Glocalink in December 2016 (both the funding rounds and amounts are undisclosed). In addition to this funding, Neurospace also revealed that it was adopted as a R&D venture support project of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). Since its launch back in in December of 2013, the company has developed a sleep improvement program called Sommnie for corporate health management. Currently the company focuses on what is called a “Sleep Analysis Platform” utilizing AI (artificial intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things) technology, and the beta version launched October 11th. With this platform, the company will measure individual sleep data with high precision, provide individualized sleep analysis results, and then offer the optimum solution and improvement data derived from independent analytical technology using AI. The platform makes it possible for companies that intend…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Neurospace, the Japanese startup developing a program to improve sleep quality for large companies, revealed that it has raised 100 million yen (about $890,000 ) from Real Tech Fund, the investment fund by Euglena, SMBC Nikko, and Leave a Nest Capital. For Neurospace, it follows funds raised from Slogan Coent and individual investors in July 2015 and from Glocalink in December 2016 (both the funding rounds and amounts are undisclosed). In addition to this funding, Neurospace also revealed that it was adopted as a R&D venture support project of the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

Since its launch back in in December of 2013, the company has developed a sleep improvement program called Sommnie for corporate health management. Currently the company focuses on what is called a “Sleep Analysis Platform” utilizing AI (artificial intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things) technology, and the beta version launched October 11th.

With this platform, the company will measure individual sleep data with high precision, provide individualized sleep analysis results, and then offer the optimum solution and improvement data derived from independent analytical technology using AI. The platform makes it possible for companies that intend to promote the health and productivity of employees and companies that are considering entering into the sleep business to incorporate into the improvement of management with the company services and IoT products through API (application programming interface).

As a PoC (proof of concept) test of the “Sleep Analysis Platform”, the company distributed a device to measure sleep and an app that presents a sleeping solution from the measured data to shift workers at Yoshinoya, a major Japanese beef bowl restaurant chain. It plans to demonstrate and brush up the effectiveness of the platform after conducting one month of sleep measurements and recommending measure for improvement and shift adjustment.

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

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