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Japanese FinTech startup Moneytree secures series C round funding from Fidelity

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Tokyo-based Moneytree, a startup that provides a personal finance app and a cloud-based accounting service, announced on Tuesday that it has secured series C round funding from Fidelity International. Details of financial terms have not been disclosed. Given that the company claims that the latest round brought their total funding sum up to 3.1 billion yen (about $29 million US), however, it is estimated to be around several to tens of millions in US dollars following the following past rounds: Seed round in 2013: 150 million yen ($1.5 million) funding from DG Incubation and angel investors. Series A round in 2015: Unknown amount funding led by Salesforce.com with participation from Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital. Series B round in 2017: 1 billion yen ($9 million) funding led by SBI Investment with participation from Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Fukuoka Technology Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, Senshu Ikeda Capital, and the UK’s leading asset management company Baillie Gifford. Venture round in 2019: Unknown amount funding from Mitsubishi UFJ Innovation Partners, Sony Financial Ventures, and NTT Data. Since the launch of a personal finance management app under the same name back in 2013, the FinTech startup has…

Image credit: Moneytree

Tokyo-based Moneytree, a startup that provides a personal finance app and a cloud-based accounting service, announced on Tuesday that it has secured series C round funding from Fidelity International.

Details of financial terms have not been disclosed. Given that the company claims that the latest round brought their total funding sum up to 3.1 billion yen (about $29 million US), however, it is estimated to be around several to tens of millions in US dollars following the following past rounds:

  • Seed round in 2013: 150 million yen ($1.5 million) funding from DG Incubation and angel investors.
  • Series A round in 2015: Unknown amount funding led by Salesforce.com with participation from Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital.
  • Series B round in 2017: 1 billion yen ($9 million) funding led by SBI Investment with participation from Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Fukuoka Technology Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, Senshu Ikeda Capital, and the UK’s leading asset management company Baillie Gifford.
  • Venture round in 2019: Unknown amount funding from Mitsubishi UFJ Innovation Partners, Sony Financial Ventures, and NTT Data.

Since the launch of a personal finance management app under the same name back in 2013, the FinTech startup has been attracting individual users with convenient functions like integrating with their bank and credit card accounts.

The company subsequently introduced the Moneytree Work platform for business use, followed by introducing an API service called MT Link back in 2015, which allows users to aggregate transactions from bank, credit card, e-wallet, and point rewards accounts. It expanded into the Australian market back in 2017.

via PR TIMES

Moneytree, Japanese personal finance app, raises $9M to better serve corporate users

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Moneytree, the Japanese startup offering an asset managing app / cloud-based accounting soutions, announced on Tuesday that it has raised a total of 1 billion yen (nearly $9 million US) in their latest funding round. This round was led by SBI Investment with participation from Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Fukuoka Technology Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, Senshu Ikeda Capital, and the UK’s leading asset management company Baillie Gifford. This round follows that of the company’s series A round held in October of 2015. With the funds raised this time, Moneytree plans to roll out new functions for their personal asset management app “Moneytree”, their “Moneytree Work Keihi Seisan (Expense Reimbursement)” that allows users to easily determine their expenses, as well as their “Moneytree Work Houjin Kouza (Corporate Accounts)” that lets users browse their corporate accounts and calculate expenses in mobile. In addition, the cloud-based account management service MT Link, which connects financial institutions with corporations and individuals, and has been in service for more than two years now, has been adopted by 20 companies including megabanks, regional banks, and accounting software industries. Together with this funding, Moneytree has also renewed the…

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Moneytree, the Japanese startup offering an asset managing app / cloud-based accounting soutions, announced on Tuesday that it has raised a total of 1 billion yen (nearly $9 million US) in their latest funding round. This round was led by SBI Investment with participation from Mizuho Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Fukuoka Technology Partners, Hiroshima Venture Capital, Senshu Ikeda Capital, and the UK’s leading asset management company Baillie Gifford. This round follows that of the company’s series A round held in October of 2015.

With the funds raised this time, Moneytree plans to roll out new functions for their personal asset management app “Moneytree”, their “Moneytree Work Keihi Seisan (Expense Reimbursement)” that allows users to easily determine their expenses, as well as their “Moneytree Work Houjin Kouza (Corporate Accounts)” that lets users browse their corporate accounts and calculate expenses in mobile.

In addition, the cloud-based account management service MT Link, which connects financial institutions with corporations and individuals, and has been in service for more than two years now, has been adopted by 20 companies including megabanks, regional banks, and accounting software industries. Together with this funding, Moneytree has also renewed the MT Link website, and is aiming to further expand and accelerate the business.

The following is a comment by Moneytree Founder and CEO Paul Chapman.

Thanks to this funding we are pleased Moneytree will be moving on to the next stage of growth. In both Japan and abroad the FinTech industry has significantly expanded. More than ever, we will focus on maintaining the security of our services, protecting privacy, and transparency of information.

In addition, while supporting the conversion of the financial industry to digital banking, and while contributing to the foundation of the accounting industry’s cloud accounting system, we will continue to devote our efforts to constructing an industry-wide ecosystem based on users. Furthermore, we have set our sights on the globalization of our services through deploying Japanese technology overseas.

See also:

Translated by Amanda Imasaka
Edited by Masaru Ikeda

Paul Chapman, Founder & CEO of Moneytree, delivered his pitch at Pioneers Asia (March 2016).
Image credit: Masaru Ikeda

 

Japanese personal finance app Moneytree raises $1.5 million

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Moneytree, a startup that provides a personal finance app, announced yesterday it that has raised 150 million yen ($1.5 million) from DG Incubation and other investors [1]. Users can register back accounts and credit accounts, and the app lets you aggregate up-to-date balances and expenses, browsing them in a single view. The app was launched back in April and quickly reached 130,000 downloads by August. Coinciding with the funding, the company also announced that it has surpassed 200,000 downloads. Looking at similar apps such as ReceReco and Zaim which both recently passes 1 million downloads, the Moneytree app still has much room to grow. With the funds raised this time around, the company is planning to integrate with more banks or financial institutions so that their users will be also able to use the app to check their balances. Upcoming plans also include adding new features, introducing a desktop and iPad version, and developing a new platform. We will follow up with an interview to hear more about what they have planned, so stay tuned. DG Incubation is the incubation arm of Japanese web conglomerate Digital Garage.↩

moneytreee

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Moneytree, a startup that provides a personal finance app, announced yesterday it that has raised 150 million yen ($1.5 million) from DG Incubation and other investors [1].

Users can register back accounts and credit accounts, and the app lets you aggregate up-to-date balances and expenses, browsing them in a single view. The app was launched back in April and quickly reached 130,000 downloads by August. Coinciding with the funding, the company also announced that it has surpassed 200,000 downloads. Looking at similar apps such as ReceReco and Zaim which both recently passes 1 million downloads, the Moneytree app still has much room to grow.

With the funds raised this time around, the company is planning to integrate with more banks or financial institutions so that their users will be also able to use the app to check their balances. Upcoming plans also include adding new features, introducing a desktop and iPad version, and developing a new platform.

We will follow up with an interview to hear more about what they have planned, so stay tuned.

moneytree-spending-group-1


  1. DG Incubation is the incubation arm of Japanese web conglomerate Digital Garage.

Big in Japan: 10 tech stories most popular with our Japanese readers

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What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more! And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it. 1. Japan loves Ginger Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever. Read more in Japanese 2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial…

What’s big in the world of Japan technology these days? Well, if our Japanese language site is any indication, the following articles represent what our Japanese readers are most interested in over the last 30 days. Read on to find out more!

And if you know of a tech story or a startup that’s big in Japan, be sure to let us know about it.

1. Japan loves Ginger

Ginger is an personalized proofreader that checks your grammar and spelling, and it’s official launch in Japan was on April 24th. The service comes in the form of a Windows application or a browser extension, and our post about its launch had over 2,000 tweets and 5,000 likes, making it one of our most read articles ever.

Read more in Japanese

gingerjp

2. Hero entrepreneurs, Ieiri and Horie

Kazuma Ieiri is a serial entrepreneur known for being the youngest founder to go public on the JASDAQ securities exchange. Takafumi Horie is the former president of Livedoor, now a portal website operated by Line Corp. Horie is now on parole after spending 21 months behind bars having been charged with securities fraud (although he still claims innocence). The two are sort of entrepreneurial heroes for the younger generation, and they gave a talk at Ieiri’s book release party where they talked about developing new hardware together.

Read more in Japanese

3. Startups should work from home

This post comes via Charlie Custer who responded to Marissa Mayer’s decision that working from home was not the right path for employees at Yahoo. He asserts that startups should allow people to work from home remotely, noting that hiring pro-active people and quantifying work by actual results rather than just hours will yield many benefits.

Read more in Japanese or see the original post in English.

4. Moneytree

Moneytree is a newly released app that allows users to manage all their financial assets. You just need to register your bank account and it will automatically show balance and spendings for your different credit cards all in a single page. The startup works out of Shibuya’s co-working space, Co-ba, and its founder is Paul Chapman from Australia.

Read more in Japanese, or check out our post on Moneytree in English

moneytreee

5. The travel industry is shifting from search to social

As we see change in consumer behavior, the travel industry is shifting accordingly. What is becoming increasingly important is not ‘where’ but ‘who’ – i.e. who among your friends have traveled to a given destination. As a result, the marketing budget for many travel companies is moving from Google to Facebook. The article cites TravelAdvisor as a good example of a company that does social well.

Read more in Japanese

6. If an engineer’s job is to make 0 into 1, a designer’s job is to make 1 into 100

katayama

Ikumi Katayama is a user interface designer at Cookpad, a major recipe website in Japan. In this interview she talks about the user interface designing process within the company and how it is all about iterating over and over by testing hypotheses and reading numbers.

Read more in Japanese

7. Using social game know-how in education

This post came out of the recent B Dash Camp 2013 event in Fukuoka. Surprisingly, many up-and-coming education startups came from the social games sector, such as Drecom and Quipper. Social gaming companies says that the features and techniques in social games (like operating events or connecting with friends) can be applied to education services as well.

Read more in Japanese or check out the article translated into English.

8. Base apps

E-commerce is getting a lot of hype in Japan recently, and Base is one of the more popular services out there, as it allows users to create their own online shop in a matter of minutes. The startups just launched Base Apps, which is a collection of plug-ins that can be added to shops created with Base. So far the app store includes an original domain, SEO, as well as shipping boxes for your merchandise – all for free. The startup plans to release a few plugins per week, attempting to follow Shopify’s monetization model.

Read more in Japanese or check out the translation in English.

9. Line China

Japanese chat application Line added another accomplishment to its growing list on April 8th, briefly nabbing the top spot in the Chinese App Store in the social network category. Line was released in Chinese back in December, needing less than four months to reach this milestone. At the time of the article, it ranked 7th among all free apps.

Read more in Japanese or see the original post on our English site.

10. Trends in Japan’s online ad space

Another report from the B Dash event in Fukuoka summarized a panel discussing existing problems in the domestic advertising business. Key players from the Japanese online advertising industry talked about the impact of social media on the industry, problems in leveraging personal information in ads, as well as the possibilities of rich media advertisements.

Read more in Japanese, or check out a summarized English report.

20130422-185321
Septeni Holdings CEO Koki Sato speaking on the panel

Japan tech this week: Origami, funding, and fun in Fukuoka

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It was a pretty busy week for us here at SD Japan. In addition to all the regular news that we typically cover, we took a shot at some live event coverage as well. Our team is small but we’re doing our best, and we hope you like some of the results. If you’d like to get this weekly summary plus other bonus content, we hope you’ll check out our shiny new newsletter here. Features Stand up: Lessons on entrepreneurship and innovation from the Japan New Economic Summit 04/24 (also available in ePub format for Kindle or iBooks) Business Japanese online content marketplace raises $3 million from Jafco and Femto Growth Capital 04/24 Business card-based CRM startup Sansan raises $5M, planning global expansion 04/24 Japan’s Mobcast partners with 13 content providers, wants to dominate sports gaming on mobile 04/24 Stealth m-commerce startup Origami raises $5M from KDDI and DAC 04/24 Design EnchantMoon handwriting tablet unveiled, first orders sold out in an hour 04/26 Tokyo City Symphony: Fun 3D projection mapping marks Roppongi Hills’ 10th anniversary 04/25 Apps Moneytree gives Japanese consumers smarter access to their finances 04/27 Japanese microblog ‘Arrow’ lets you vent stress towards a single random stranger 04/25…

e27 Echelon Japan satellite event
e27 Echelon Japan satellite event

It was a pretty busy week for us here at SD Japan. In addition to all the regular news that we typically cover, we took a shot at some live event coverage as well. Our team is small but we’re doing our best, and we hope you like some of the results.

If you’d like to get this weekly summary plus other bonus content, we hope you’ll check out our shiny new newsletter here.

Features

Business

Design

Apps

Startups

Events

B Dash Camp 2013 Fukuoka (04 22/23)

e27’s Echelon Tokyo Satellite event

Samurai Venture Summit

NTT Docomo Innovation Ventures kick-off event

Moneytree gives Japanese consumers smarter access to their finances

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See the original story in Japanese. Our readers may recall when we recently featured Japanese personal finance app Zaim. It finally has OCR functionality which can collect purchase data just by taking a photo of your receipt. But as many people have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards, they might be interested in a more robust financial organization system for their money management. Australian entrepreneur Paul Chapman (based in Japan) has created Moneytree, a smartphone app that allows users to manage their spending by importing bank balances and card billing updates. The app has a sort of artificial intelligence, and can sort your spendings into the appropriate categories. Its data analysis feature will surface trends about your spending too. In comparison to similar apps, Moneytree eliminates much of the manual work, as it just syncs with user accounts from more than 30 banks and credit card companies. The Moneytree team is working out of Co-ba, a co-working space in Shibuya. As to why they developed this sort of app, Paul explains: People feel tracking their finances is a heavy burden. It takes too much time, so people give up soon after starting, and that makes you feel a sense…

moneytreee

See the original story in Japanese.

Our readers may recall when we recently featured Japanese personal finance app Zaim. It finally has OCR functionality which can collect purchase data just by taking a photo of your receipt. But as many people have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards, they might be interested in a more robust financial organization system for their money management.

Australian entrepreneur Paul Chapman (based in Japan) has created Moneytree, a smartphone app that allows users to manage their spending by importing bank balances and card billing updates.

The app has a sort of artificial intelligence, and can sort your spendings into the appropriate categories. Its data analysis feature will surface trends about your spending too. In comparison to similar apps, Moneytree eliminates much of the manual work, as it just syncs with user accounts from more than 30 banks and credit card companies.

mtkk-presskit-detail

The Moneytree team is working out of Co-ba, a co-working space in Shibuya. As to why they developed this sort of app, Paul explains:

People feel tracking their finances is a heavy burden. It takes too much time, so people give up soon after starting, and that makes you feel a sense of guilt. Moneytree is an app that seeks to do the hard work for you — after signing up, you just open the app on your device to see bank balances or credit card usage.

These days, with a growing number of e-commerce services out there, consumers will tend to use cash less often when purchase, preferring to use credit card or e-money. New payment methods, such as the Coiney app for example, could drastically change the Japanese payment market and increase the volume of credit card transactions.

It will be interesting to see where Moneytree will fit in among the forest of finance management options available in Japan.