6 Popular Startups in Japan
In order to attract the attention of society and investors to their project, a modern person has a lot of tools - advertising services, social networks and platforms for crowdfunding. This explains the abundance of startups. Many of them do not live even a month, others manage to collect millions of dollars in the shortest possible time. The projects listed below are gaining more and more popularity in their homeland - in Japan. Who knows, maybe the whole world will soon start talking about them. JapanTaxiDespite the fact that the king of ridesharing Uber has signed a contract with SoftBank in the amount of $ 1 billion and plans to take over the world, Japanese taxi drivers are not going to give their customers into the hands of American "occupiers". Since June 2017, JapanTaxi's ride-sharing service has raised about $ 86 million, with 70 million from the auto giant Toyota. Since the beginning of 2018, an additional $ 10 million has been received from the Future Creation Fund and the Sparx Group for the development of the company. Other Japanese operators are also working to improve their services. Nihon Kotsu and Daiwa Motor Transportation have already launched their own ridesharing apps. Cinnamon Cinnamon is a project that uses AI to help people get better at everyday tasks like searching for information, reading, etc. One of Cinnamon's developments is called Flax Scanner. It is an algorithm that scans a long document and selects only key information from it. Lapis Engine by Cinnamon is a search engine built on natural language processing technology. Its goal is to help online stores and recruiting platforms find customers. Cinnamon originally promoted the private photo sharing application Seconds. However, after the startup received $ 1.5 million in 2014 from CyberAgent Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, TBS Innovation Partners and Incubate Fund, management decided to focus on developing another application, PicChat. After that, Cinnamon delved into artificial intelligence. This year the company was funded by MT Partners, Monex Ventures and RPA Holdings. The exact amount of their investments is kept secret. Jisak BioengineeringJiro Kawada, founder of Jisak Bioengineering, is single-handedly searching for a drug against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (an incurable nerve cell disease that leads to the gradual loss of motor functions to respiratory arrest). The startup is developing a special screening technique that will be useful for diagnosing other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. Kawada has already raised $ 1.5 million from ANRI, Media Future, Essential Pharma and Ohara Pharma. CureAppCureApp is a smartphone application in which users can take notes about their current health status and receive a prognosis of the development of the disease. The collected data is sent to the main center for statistical research. The application offers each user individual recommendations for adjusting lifestyle and diet, helps in the fight against smoking and liver diseases not related to alcohol consumption. With its development, the company hopes to interest people in a healthy lifestyle, raise the consciousness of citizens and save the state from part of the costs that it incurs on the popularization of medical services. Investors are seriously interested in CureApp. During the year of its existence, the startup raised about $ 3.3 million. In a recent fundraising event in February, he received an additional $ 15 million from Japanese organizations Keio Innovation Initiative, Dai-ichi Life Group, Iwagin Capital and many others. MatcherFinding a job in Japan is difficult not only for an immigrant, but also for a local resident. To help university students find employment, the Matcher platform connects them with professionals from a variety of industries. Both sides benefit from this: students get answers to their work questions, and organizations can use the platform to find new hires. Fundraising in support of Matcher has been going on since January 2017, during this time about $ 500,000 has been received from several Japanese firms and private investors for the development of the startup. Market Drive$ 1.5 million in December last year and $ 1 million since the beginning of this - that is how much was transferred to Market Drive for the development of the EveEve application. EveEve is a romantic dating service. Its feature is a two-stage system for checking new members, in which both application moderators and existing users take part. Users who like each other can agree on a "trial period" during which they will communicate through the application at a strictly allotted time: for example, every Friday from 21:00 to midnight. EveEve has a lot of competitors in the dating app market. Among them are Japanese Tapple.me, Pairs and Omiai and many foreign ones like Tinder. The Topic of Article: 6 Popular Startups in Japan. |
