Japan’s Conyac, a crowd translation startup, acquired for $14m

Photo credit: decentred.

Via The Bridge:

Japanese translation service giant Rozetta (TSE:6182) announced today [August 9, 2016] that it would take the entire stake in Tokyo-based Anydoor, the company behind crowdsourced translation service Conyac, for about 1.4 billion yen (about $14 million). In this deal, the startup plans to exchange its 49.88% stake for the acquirer’s share and receive a value for the remaining 50.12% stake in cash.

This is a big win for the Japanese startup scene which is historically lacking acquisitions, although Japanese corporations hold a lot of cash. In 2013, 50 percent of nominal GDP (PDF) was held by non-financial companies. Anydoor had around US$800,000 invested to date.

Rozetta previously focused on industry specific translation like biomedics and law. The acquisition of Conyac will put it in direct competition with crowdsourcing translation service, Gengo which has raised US$25.5 million and barely missed the cutoff for being one of Japan’s top funded startups this year.