THE BRIDGE

tag Daisuke Sasaki

Japanese accounting startup Freee raises $2.7 million from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM

Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
SHARE:

Tokyo-based cloud startup Freee announced today that it has raised 270 million yen (approximately $2.7 million) in a series A funding from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM. This follows the previous seed round where the company secured seed funding of 50 million yen (about $523,000) from DCM back in December. Coinciding with this new funding, the startup rebranded its company name to Freee from CFO K.K., coinciding with the name of its accounting service. At the time of its launch back in March, CEO Daisuke Sasaki stated his goal of acquiring at least 10,000 users in its first year. Surprisingly it is way ahead of that pace, acquiring 6,500 users in the last four and half months, 1.7 times faster than expected. The startup originally planned series A funding for the end of this year but moved up its timeline to accelerate service expansion and user growth. With these new funds, the startup is expecting to hire additional staff and intensify its system development. According to Mr. Sasaki, their users have given them a lot of feedback, and they have been adding features and refining user interface based on those responses. He believes these efforts have helped them acquire many…

freee_new_logo-c3970ad3866dd25fda6b1c27779b6173Tokyo-based cloud startup Freee announced today that it has raised 270 million yen (approximately $2.7 million) in a series A funding from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM. This follows the previous seed round where the company secured seed funding of 50 million yen (about $523,000) from DCM back in December. Coinciding with this new funding, the startup rebranded its company name to Freee from CFO K.K., coinciding with the name of its accounting service.

At the time of its launch back in March, CEO Daisuke Sasaki stated his goal of acquiring at least 10,000 users in its first year. Surprisingly it is way ahead of that pace, acquiring 6,500 users in the last four and half months, 1.7 times faster than expected. The startup originally planned series A funding for the end of this year but moved up its timeline to accelerate service expansion and user growth.

With these new funds, the startup is expecting to hire additional staff and intensify its system development. According to Mr. Sasaki, their users have given them a lot of feedback, and they have been adding features and refining user interface based on those responses. He believes these efforts have helped them acquire many new users, and now his first priority is to form a responsive team.

daisuke_sasaki
Freee CEO Daisuke Sasaki

The company has three key topics that it will focus on moving forward: opening up to third-party services, easing collaborative work, and providing a better user experience. They plan to introduce an API that encourages third-party developers to connect with its platform, which should help the platform in terms of its collaborative capabilities. To improve user experience, they are expecting to introduce a native app for tablet devices to allow users to record and sort out their revenue and expenses regardless of where they are.

Some of our readers may recall that the company previously won the top prize at the Infinity Ventures Summit back in May, a conference hosted by Japan’s Infinity Ventures Partners. We’ve seen more than a few outstanding financial apps in the Japanese startup scene, and Freee can be considered to be among the best of them.

Related news

  1. Japan’s cloud-based accounting startup Freee raises $29 million in series C round
  2. Accounting startup Freee walks ways the winner from Infinity Ventures’ Launchpad competition
  3. free Japanese cloud-based accounting startup Freee raises $8M

How a Japanese stealth startup plans to push small business accounting to the cloud

Masaru Ikeda Masaru Ikeda
SHARE:

Tokyo-based startup CFO K.K. today unveiled a cloud-based accounting solution called Freee, a service that aims to set SME owners free from routine accounting. For such business owners to complete tasks that need to be approved by a taxation office, you need knowledge of commercial book-keeping. But this can be time consuming and usually is not possible on tablets or Macintosh laptops [1]. By synchronizing your account on this cloud system with web services provided by banks and credit companies [2], your payments will be transferred to the system with web-scraping technology and sorted into appropriate categories corresponding to the items you’ve purchased. The system also has a feature that allows you to print out a final return form for your income tax, which meets the requirement taxation offices in Japan. The startup is expecting to develop more features, adding an API to connect with third-party services, and optimizing browsing for multiple devices. CFO K.K. was founded in July of 2012 by ex-Googler Daisuke Sasaki and ex-Sony engineer Ryu Yokoji. They’ve been developing the service as a stealth project at their home, and fundraised 50 million yen (about $523,000) from notable US-based VC firm DCM in December. The startup’s CEO…

freee_new_logo-c3970ad3866dd25fda6b1c27779b6173

Tokyo-based startup CFO K.K. today unveiled a cloud-based accounting solution called Freee, a service that aims to set SME owners free from routine accounting. For such business owners to complete tasks that need to be approved by a taxation office, you need knowledge of commercial book-keeping. But this can be time consuming and usually is not possible on tablets or Macintosh laptops [1].

By synchronizing your account on this cloud system with web services provided by banks and credit companies [2], your payments will be transferred to the system with web-scraping technology and sorted into appropriate categories corresponding to the items you’ve purchased. The system also has a feature that allows you to print out a final return form for your income tax, which meets the requirement taxation offices in Japan. The startup is expecting to develop more features, adding an API to connect with third-party services, and optimizing browsing for multiple devices.

freee_screenshot2

CFO K.K. was founded in July of 2012 by ex-Googler Daisuke Sasaki and ex-Sony engineer Ryu Yokoji. They’ve been developing the service as a stealth project at their home, and fundraised 50 million yen (about $523,000) from notable US-based VC firm DCM in December. The startup’s CEO previously served as the CFO of a web company where he witnessed that the company accountants were always tired from time-consuming tasks. This prompted him to launch Free to address this problem.

daisuke_sasaki
CFO K.K.’s CEO Daisuke Sasaki

It’s a freemium service, allowing you to share and manage the accounting records of your company with two other colleagues. All paid plans are available for free until June, as the startup hopes to acquire at least 10,000 SME in its first year. In this field of accounting services for SMEs, freelancers, and consumers, I can think of more than a dozen prominent players. Expect intense competition, and maybe some mergers and acquisitions in the not-so-distant future.

  1. Most of Japanese accounting software packages are intended for use on Windows PCs only.  ↩
  2. Regarding account aggregation, Freee can pull passbook or payment records from 15 financial institutions as of the time of its release.  ↩

Related news

  1. Accounting startup Freee walks ways the winner from Infinity Ventures’ Launchpad competition
  2. freee-logo Japanese accounting startup Freee raises $2.7 million from Infinity Venture Partners and DCM
  3. Japanese personal accounting startup Money Forward raises $5 million

Recent Articles

Trends