Fenox and Mitsubishi join $2.7m investment in Japanese chat app AOS Mobile

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Tokyo-based AOS Mobile has raised close to US$2.7 million in a funding round led by Fenox Venture Capital. Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Accord Ventures, Voyage Ventures, Ibis Capital Partners, and Evolable Asia also invested.

AOS uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help enterprises communicate through mobile with their customers. Some of the larger brands that use AOS solutions include airline ANA, taxi firm Nihon Kotsu, telco Freetel, ecommerce site Zozotown, pawn shop app Cash.jp, which was recently acquired by ecommerce player DMM.com.

Its products include AOSSMS, which enables businesses to send SMS text messages simultaneously and securely to multiple recipients, who are then able to respond via SMS. This platform has been used for purposes such as advertising or conducting customer surveys.

Another AOS product is InCircle, a high-security messenger that can be used as an office chat app.

The company also creates chatbots that can handle customer service interactions, freeing up human personnel and other resources that can be reassigned to more complex tasks.

These products have their roots in evidence restoration technology developed by AOS Mobile’s former parent company, AOS Technologies, from which it was spun out in March 2015.

Second life

AOS Technologies – which holds a 39 percent stake in AOS Mobile following the Fenox-led round – engineered a variety of tech solutions for use in legal services and law enforcement, including forensics and e-discovery tools.

These essentially involve identifying and extracting information that is hidden or difficult to access. The expertise AOS gained in this area gave it deep insights into digital security, and AOS Mobile was established to commercialize these technologies for customer services purposes.

“We had been analyzing and investigating SMS, consumer-based chat, email, and other forms of data on behalf of police departments and prosecutors’ offices when lawsuits happen,” AOS Mobile CEO Noriko Harada tells Tech in Asia. “So we knew the weak point of consumer-based chat and we knew that information can leak if an enterprise uses these tools.”

AOS is not the only Asian startup offering an office chat app or AI-driven customer service chatbots. For the latter category, Indonesia’s Kata.ai, and Singaporean outfits Active.ai and Pixibo have raised funding in recent months.

See: Ex-Googler’s startup gets funding to solve ‘online fashion’s oldest problem’

However, Harada suggests that AOS Mobile’s integration of SMS messaging with office chat and chatbot technology is what sets it apart. “There are many competitors in business chat market,” she says. “Also, there are many in SMS aggregator platforms. But there are no direct competitors who have both, which makes our position unique in the market.”

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