Tokyo-based Fringe81, the Japanese startup offering several adtech solutions, 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 27 June with plans to offer 108,800 shares for public subscription and to sell 39,000 shares in over-allotment options, for a total of 151,300 shares. Nomura Securities will lead the underwriting.

Its share price range will be released on 6 June with bookbuilding scheduled to start on 8 June and pricing on 15 June. According to the consolidated statement as of March 2017, they posted revenue of 4.5 billion yen (about $40.5 million) and an ordinary loss of 54 million yen ($486,000). Public offering price per share is expected to be around 2,070 yen ($18.6).

Led by the company’s CEO, Yuzuru Tanaka, (holding a 49.8% stake), its major shareholders include Itochu Technology Ventures (16.84%), Cyber Communications (5.54%) and CyberAgent (5.48%).

Fringe81 was launched in 2005 under the former name of RSS Kokokusha (literally meaning RSS ad agency) where they had been focused on advertising in RSS feeds. Rebranded to Fringe81 in 2010, the company has added several new ad tech solutions including Digitalice, a cloud-based ad server platform that allows advertisers and media companies to analyze ad performance as well as user behavior and how their users crawl the websites after viewing ads.

In February of 2015, Fringe81 raised 420 million yen (about $3.53 million) from iStyle Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures, Gree, Dentsu Digital Holdings and TBS Innovation Partners [1]. Prior to that, the company had raised 240 million yen (about $2.6 million at the exchange rate then) from Itochu Technology Ventures in March of 2013.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

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1. iStyle Capital is the investment arm of iStyle, the company behind Japan’s leading cosmetics review portal @Cosme. TBS Innovation Partners is the investment arm of Tokyo-based private broadcaster Tokyo Broadcasting System, or TBS for short.  ↩