Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition. Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April. Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below). Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011,…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo service Kiddy, announced on Monday that it had been recently acquired by Japanese internet company Mixi (TSE:2121). Financial terms regarding the deal have not been disclosed but Compath.me’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando plus his some colleagues will join Mixi upon the acquisition.
Mixi’s ‘Vantage Studio’ department, the new business development team directly led by Mixi co-founder and chairman Shinji Kasahara, has been offering a family photo service called Mitene (meaning ‘Check out this!’ in Japanese) since 2015. The company announced earlier this month that the app has acquired over 1 million users. According to the statement from Compath.me, the Kiddy app is expected to be merged into the Mitene app soon with the user migration. The Kiddy app will be completely shutting down in late April.
Meanwhile, Mixi recently started broadcasting TV commercials across Japan to boost user acquisition for the Mitene app (see video below).
Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.Compath.me was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. Starting with a photo-sharing app aiming to help users discover locations and events around them, they subsequently pivoted to the family photo service in 2013.
Compath.me has fundraised an undisclosed sum in a seed round from DG Incubation (the company operating Open Network Lab as well as the investment arm subsidiary of Digital Garage), Architype and Netprice.com (now known as Beenos, TSE:3328). Subsequently the startup raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United (TSE:2497) in May of 2014.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United. The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com [1]. Low birth rate, high potential business The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around: Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind family photo sharing platform Kiddy, announced today that it has raised 50 million yen (about $492,000) from Japanese internet company United.
The company was originally launched back in 2011, graduating from Tokyo-based startup incubator Open Network Lab. This latest news follows its previous seed funding from DG Incubation, Architype, and Netprice.com[1].
Low birth rate, high potential business
The company launched its photo sharing platform in December of 2012, and subsequently started printing and delivering photo postcards and photobooks last year. So far Kiddy has acquired 50,000 households (or families) as users and over 3 million photo and comment entries on the platform. The company’s founder and CEO Hiromichi Ando explained a little more about the funding this time around:
CEO Hiromichi Ando
Our service allows users to deliver printed postcards or photobooks to as many as three different locations. We learned that many customers chose three locations, typically printing photos of their children and delivering them to both sets of grandparents. As for the photobooks, we are providing a premium version (3,100 yen per photo book, excluding shipping) using silver-halide prints in addition to the lower priced offering (1,550 yen per book). The premium option is costly, but it’s selling well. Grandparents want to see how their grandchildren are growing even if they live far away. This motivation helps us increase our sales per customer.
In a low-birth rate society like Japan, it is said that every child has six money streams, if you count parents and grandparents. This concept helps the company be more profitable despite the fact that its user base is not as much as is typically needed for monetization.
Becoming an information platform
The startup intends to shift its platform from family photo storage to a comprehensive information platform where users learn what others family members are doing in their daily lives. Ando explained:
Three or four family members are typically connected to each other on our platform. A couple may divorce or remarry after having their child, so we’ll add a feature that allows users to control privacy about their photo or messages.
He plans to use these latest funds to hire new people and enhance the platform’s features. They are currently a four-person team, but they’ll add a COO and several engineers to accelerate system development efforts.
Global expansion
So far the company has about 20% of users, or about 10,000 families, accessing Kiddy from outside Japan. Considering this demand, they have to think about the internationalization of the platform. Ando explained how they will address the problem:
International shipping has been available only for postcards but not for our photo album products. But considering that as many as 20% of users are from outside Japan, we asked our printing and shipping companies to enable international shipping of photo album products, starting in the first week of June. Shipping charges will be higher than domestic delivery, but I think there’s a huge demand from users out there.
The service is currently available in English and Japanese. But in order to better serve its global user base, they will add French and German interfaces this July. The company has already exhibited and presented at several startup conferences in Europe, such as LeWeb in Paris and WebSummit in Dublin. Ando feels that these promotional activities has helped them build brand awareness in those regions.
In this space we’ve already seen many competitors, including Kazoc, Nicori, BabyDays, Ikumemo, and Wellnote (See this article for details). But Kiddy fares better than these competitors on the App Store in terms of number of reviews and average rating.
Moving forward Kiddy will focus on improving user satisfaction, with the end goal of having the top market share in Japan and the rest of the world. They hope to surpass a million households worldwide by the end of 2015.
Open Network Lab is the incubation arm of Japanese internet company Digital Garage. DG Incubation is the startup-focused investment arm of Digital Garage. The investment arm of NetPrice.com has been rebranded to Beenos. ↩
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind the mobile family photo service Kiddy, recently announced it has started accepting orders to print and deliver New Year’s cards from their users. Kiddy is designed to help families share photos securely (see our previous review of the app) and since its launch back in December, the startup has acquired 35,000 households from Japan and the rest of the world. Together those users have uploaded over 1.4 million family photos, and that’s without any aggressive promotional efforts from Compath.me. According to the company’s CEO, Hiromichi Ando, there are few secure ways to share photos with other family members, such as grandparents who might live far away. Facebook or Twitter might show them to an unintended audience, and services like DropBox and Flickr may be too complicated for some grandparents. Of course, sharing pictures over e-mail is troublesome. With that in mind, Kiddy works as a photo-sharing cloud for families rather than a social network platform. It allows users to order printed pictures which can then be delivered in a physical form like postcards or photobooks. In other words, you can easily deliver pictures of your kids to grandparents who…
Tokyo-based Compath.me, the startup behind the mobile family photo service Kiddy, recently announced it has started accepting orders to print and deliver New Year’s cards from their users.
Kiddy is designed to help families share photos securely (see our previous review of the app) and since its launch back in December, the startup has acquired 35,000 households from Japan and the rest of the world. Together those users have uploaded over 1.4 million family photos, and that’s without any aggressive promotional efforts from Compath.me.
According to the company’s CEO, Hiromichi Ando, there are few secure ways to share photos with other family members, such as grandparents who might live far away. Facebook or Twitter might show them to an unintended audience, and services like DropBox and Flickr may be too complicated for some grandparents. Of course, sharing pictures over e-mail is troublesome.
With that in mind, Kiddy works as a photo-sharing cloud for families rather than a social network platform. It allows users to order printed pictures which can then be delivered in a physical form like postcards or photobooks. In other words, you can easily deliver pictures of your kids to grandparents who might be unfamiliar with most digital tools.
Taking their service one step further, Kiddy now allows you to create and order a New Year’s card. In addition to the many designs available to choose from, they also provide Pensta style templates, a set of stickers especially popular among young women.
Nohana, a subsidiary of Japanese social giant Mixi, which offers its own photo printing service, also recently launched a New Year’s card print and delivery service.
While many social interactions are adapting to digital, seasons greetings using your own mobile photos is the niche where analog media can still offer some value.
Update: Kiddy was chosen today as a finalist for the startup competition at LeWeb 2013, a tech event happening in Paris this December.
Having recently joined the ranks of parenthood, I’ve been in the market for useful apps with which I could privately archive pictures of my new arrival. I don’t want to be one of those over-sharing parents on Facebook, nor do I want to publicly photos far beyond my immediate family and friends. Kiddy is a photo sharing application from Japan which attempts to solve this sort of problem, letting you keep a calendar-like photo diary of your child’s development in a more private environment. If you do want to share your photos, you can push images to Facebook, or send them via email from the application. But the most interesting sharing feature for the app is what’s called the ‘Kiddy Card.’ This feature allows you to select five of your best photos, and create a sort of postcard which you can then send to family members in the mail. Currently Kiddy is offering a free Kiddy Card campaign for the first five hundred applicants. If you’d like to send to one address, it’s $2.59 per month; two addresses is $4.99 per month, and three addresses is $6.99 per month. In Japan in particular, with its rapidly aging population, this function…
Having recently joined the ranks of parenthood, I’ve been in the market for useful apps with which I could privately archive pictures of my new arrival. I don’t want to be one of those over-sharing parents on Facebook, nor do I want to publicly photos far beyond my immediate family and friends.
Kiddy is a photo sharing application from Japan which attempts to solve this sort of problem, letting you keep a calendar-like photo diary of your child’s development in a more private environment. If you do want to share your photos, you can push images to Facebook, or send them via email from the application.
But the most interesting sharing feature for the app is what’s called the ‘Kiddy Card.’ This feature allows you to select five of your best photos, and create a sort of postcard which you can then send to family members in the mail. Currently Kiddy is offering a free Kiddy Card campaign for the first five hundred applicants.
If you’d like to send to one address, it’s $2.59 per month; two addresses is $4.99 per month, and three addresses is $6.99 per month. In Japan in particular, with its rapidly aging population, this function is a good way to ensure that grandparents aren’t left stranded across the digital divide.
Kiddy has been around for just a few months, but so far it seems to have found a surprising niche in the ‘medical’ category on Apple’s Japanese App Store. And an Android app is said to be on the way as well. Kiddy was created by the same folks behind Compath.me, a Tokyo startup which many of you may recognize. Check out their promo video below:
Other alternatives
Another made-in-Japan baby diary app on the market that parents might want to check out is Daiby, from Hakuhodo DY Media Partners. As for my own baby diary of choice, I still plan to use Notabli, primarily due to its ease of use, support for audio and video moments, and its promise to liberate my photos and data if I choose to quit the app in the future. (I’m glad to see however that Kiddy also plans to have this function soon.)
Kiddy’s service of delivering your pictures on paper is somewhat reminiscent of Mixi’s Nohana photo book service. That application, amazingly, lets you order one free book per month, not including a minor shipping fee. I recently ordered one, and I look forward to seeing how it turns out.
kiddy 
Masaru Ikeda
Rick Martin
Having recently joined the ranks of parenthood, I’ve been in the market for useful apps with which I could privately archive pictures of my new arrival. I don’t want to be one of those over-sharing parents on Facebook, nor do I want to publicly photos far beyond my immediate family and friends. 
