4 rising startups in Japan

Another week, another roundup. Read on to see what startups got funding in Japan last week.

Gochikuru by Star Festival

Star Festival owns and operates Gochikuru an online food delivery service. Gochikuru provides both event catering and delivery of “Bento,” or traditional Japanese lunchboxes. According to the startup, it delivers over 7,400 different products across Japan.

Star Festival raised just under US$9 million in funding last week.

Fundinno by Japan Cloud Capital

Fundinno is a crowdfunding service run by Japan Cloud Capital. Fundinno’s crowdfunding projects are for unlisted, small companies. Much like investing, people who give money to a company through the site receive equity in the company. Small companies that normally would struggle to receive investment can find funding by posting on the site. Equity crowdfunding is still relatively new in Japan, so companies like Fundinno are somewhat rare.

A group of companies and angel investors provided the company with over US$1 million in funds last Thursday, reports TechCrunch.

Polyglots

Polyglots is an English language learning application. The application provides users with articles and other reading material for practice. While reading, users can tap on words or sentences they don’t understand to add them to a study list. Previously users could only read articles provided by Polyglot, but their new featured called WebReader lets users use the app on any website of their choice.

The startup received US$584,000 in funding last week. In 2015, East Ventures and several private investors invested nearly US$180,000 in the company to get it off the ground. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics statement for more info.)

Cobit by Biztex

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