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Japanese quiz app BrainWars snags $2.8 million in funding from Line and others

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based TransLimit, the startup that develops social quiz app BrainWars, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 300 million yen (approximately $2.8 million) form Line Ventures, United, East Ventures, Skyland Ventures, and Genuine Startups. Line Ventures is a subsidiary of messaging company Line, focused on managing a $10 million investment fund called ‘Line Game Global Gateway.’ After start-up in August, the fund has already invested in Japanese gaming company Gumi as its first portfolio company. See also: Japanese startup Translimit raises $100,000 to launch social quiz app Japanese startup launches social quiz app ‘BrainWars’ Japanese quiz app BrainWars ranks in the app store top charts As for BrainWars, during the five months following its launch on May 14, over 3 million downloads of the app from across the world have taken place. Coinciding with this announcement, TransLimit secured a partnership with Line and will “line up” a new game title using the Line user base. The gaming company also unveiled a planned development of a smartphone media business with United, another investor in this round.

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The Translimit team

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based TransLimit, the startup that develops social quiz app BrainWars, announced on Thursday that it has fundraised 300 million yen (approximately $2.8 million) form Line Ventures, United, East Ventures, Skyland Ventures, and Genuine Startups. Line Ventures is a subsidiary of messaging company Line, focused on managing a $10 million investment fund called ‘Line Game Global Gateway.’ After start-up in August, the fund has already invested in Japanese gaming company Gumi as its first portfolio company.

See also:

As for BrainWars, during the five months following its launch on May 14, over 3 million downloads of the app from across the world have taken place.

Coinciding with this announcement, TransLimit secured a partnership with Line and will “line up” a new game title using the Line user base. The gaming company also unveiled a planned development of a smartphone media business with United, another investor in this round.

translimit-team-line2
Line’s CSMO Jun Masda unveils their investment in Translimit at Line Conference Tokyo 2014.

Japanese quiz app BrainWars ranks in the app store top charts

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This is the abridged version of this and that articles. Tokyo-based Translimit, the startup behind Japanese social quiz app BrainWars, announced today that it has surpassed 400,000 downloads. This record was reached less than eleven weeks after the iOS app was unveiled on May 14th. Coinciding with this milestone, the company announced that the app has recently reached third place in the top grossing rank in the US App Store, with 95% of their users located outside Japan. BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs best. The app is currently available in Japanese, English and Spanish. They told us that they will add Chinese and Korean in the next version being released shortly, with an Android version to be introduced in mid-August. Meanwhile, Translimit also announced that it has started a promotion campaign with Tokyo-based lunch box delivery startup Bento.jp, , where Translimit gives you a complimentary lunch delivery from Bento.jp if you can win a quiz competition against Translimit’s official account. Even if you lose the game, you get a 10% discount coupon for the lunch delivery service. The campaign will run from today until…

top_charts

This is the abridged version of this and that articles.

Tokyo-based Translimit, the startup behind Japanese social quiz app BrainWars, announced today that it has surpassed 400,000 downloads. This record was reached less than eleven weeks after the iOS app was unveiled on May 14th. Coinciding with this milestone, the company announced that the app has recently reached third place in the top grossing rank in the US App Store, with 95% of their users located outside Japan.

BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs best. The app is currently available in Japanese, English and Spanish. They told us that they will add Chinese and Korean in the next version being released shortly, with an Android version to be introduced in mid-August.

Meanwhile, Translimit also announced that it has started a promotion campaign with Tokyo-based lunch box delivery startup Bento.jp, , where Translimit gives you a complimentary lunch delivery from Bento.jp if you can win a quiz competition against Translimit’s official account. Even if you lose the game, you get a 10% discount coupon for the lunch delivery service. The campaign will run from today until July 30th (Wednesday).

bentowars

Japanese startup launches social quiz app ‘BrainWars’

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Translimit recently launched a social quiz app called BrainWars. The new app is available for iOS in both English and Japanese. BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Our readers may recall that we mentioned this app when the company secured funding from Genuine Startup and Skyland Ventures back in March. Since then, their team has been largely devoted to improving the app’s interface. So today we’d like to focus a little more on the functions that were added as part of their improvement efforts. BrainWars lets you compete against other players online, but you can compete even when that person is offline since the system virtually reproduces them as your competitor based on their past records. They call this their ‘ghost’ function. In this way, you can encourage your friends to play against you or others by sharing just a link via Facebook, Twitter, or Line. The company is planning to first invite serial entrepreneurs as their users and then market the app by having new users to play against such notable people. Making the grade…

brainwars_featuredimage

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based startup Translimit recently launched a social quiz app called BrainWars. The new app is available for iOS in both English and Japanese.

BrainWars pits players against one another in three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Our readers may recall that we mentioned this app when the company secured funding from Genuine Startup and Skyland Ventures back in March. Since then, their team has been largely devoted to improving the app’s interface. So today we’d like to focus a little more on the functions that were added as part of their improvement efforts.

iphone_and_battle

BrainWars lets you compete against other players online, but you can compete even when that person is offline since the system virtually reproduces them as your competitor based on their past records. They call this their ‘ghost’ function.

In this way, you can encourage your friends to play against you or others by sharing just a link via Facebook, Twitter, or Line. The company is planning to first invite serial entrepreneurs as their users and then market the app by having new users to play against such notable people.

Making the grade

They initially planned to deploy a very simple grading system, assigning a level like beginner or professional, where a user’s grade increases as he or she improves. But at the time of launch, they decided on a more elaborate system with 25 grades, starting first with a chicken, then a turtle.

You can choose three out of 12 quiz game categories (like FlickMaster, DoubtColor, and High and Low) in determining what kind of questions you expect to see in the match. If you don’t choose categories, the system will choose them automatically. If you intentionally choose the categories, you will need to consume a coin, which requires an actual purchase.

Every user has several ‘heart’ points when starting out, but one ‘heart’ point will be consumed every time you play a match. This stamina-based purchase model is, of course, common in many mobile games these days.

The company also plans to advertise using the aforementioned ‘ghost’ player function. Major brands can market themselves by encouraging consumers to playing against their characters in the app. Considering the categories, you may assume demographics are broad ranging, but we understand that the app can show ads according to age or gender, which lets brands easily target a certain user base.

The company appears to have a much improved user interface at launch. The quality of animated graphics and sound effects should allow the app to attain the same kind of popularity as many game titles. Let’s wait and see how it does!

Japanese startup Translimit raises $100,000 to launch social quiz app

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Tokyo-based startup Translimit announced today that it has raised 10 million yen (about $100,000) from Genuine Startups [1] and Skyland Ventures. The funds will go towards launching a mobile quiz app with social competition features. The app will be called BrainWars, with an iOS version coming in mid-April, and an Android version to follow in June. BrainWars pits players against one another, playing three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Since these games require no verbal response [2], and users around the world can play and compete against each other regardless of language. The match is arranged to let you to play in real time, but if you can’t find anyone available to compete with, you can compete with someone you know according to their past results. In this space, we’ve already seen US-based Plain Vanilla Games, the startup behind trivia app QuizUp, which secured series B funding of $22 million from Sequoia Capital late last year. Here in Japan Namco Bandai has been selling a brain exercise app called Zen Notore. There’s Colopl Quiz RPG which has seen some success as well (iOS/Android). Translimit was initially launched back in January by Hiroki…

hiroki-takaba
Translimit CEO Hiroki Takaba

Tokyo-based startup Translimit announced today that it has raised 10 million yen (about $100,000) from Genuine Startups [1] and Skyland Ventures. The funds will go towards launching a mobile quiz app with social competition features. The app will be called BrainWars, with an iOS version coming in mid-April, and an Android version to follow in June.

BrainWars pits players against one another, playing three sets of mental exercise games (15 seconds each) to see which player performs better. Since these games require no verbal response [2], and users around the world can play and compete against each other regardless of language. The match is arranged to let you to play in real time, but if you can’t find anyone available to compete with, you can compete with someone you know according to their past results.

battlehome

In this space, we’ve already seen US-based Plain Vanilla Games, the startup behind trivia app QuizUp, which secured series B funding of $22 million from Sequoia Capital late last year. Here in Japan Namco Bandai has been selling a brain exercise app called Zen Notore. There’s Colopl Quiz RPG which has seen some success as well (iOS/Android).

Translimit was initially launched back in January by Hiroki Takaba and Takuma Kudo, both of whom previously worked at CyberAgent companies. They have been involved in several game projects together, including the virtual avatar service Ameba Pico (which shut down back in 2012) and mobile social game Girl Friend BETA. The Translimit team is participating in Movida Japan incubation program here in Tokyo.


  1. Genuine Startups is an investment fund spun off from Movida Japan.
  2. It could be a mathematical equation where you have to fill in the operator, for example.