6 rising startups in Japan

The Japan funding roundup is in! Investors picked up a wide variety of firms last week, ranging from game developers to wearable tech designers.

Preferred Networks

Preferred Networks uses real-time machine learning algorithms for devices, especially in the industrial, manufacturing, transportation, and biomedical spaces.

The company received a whopping US$94.8 million from Toyota last week – making it one of Japan’s most funded companies. Check out our dedicated coverage of the investment here.

Sansan

Sansan provides customer relations management solutions.

The service lets users scan business cards from associates, allowing companies to store and easily share contact info among staff. This kind of software is particularly convenient in Japan because of the volume of business cards exchanged in the Japanese business world.

Sansan received just under US$38 million in funding from three investors, reports The Bridge. In addition to Preferred Networks’ funding, Toyota invested in Sansan as well.

Hamon by Mitsufuji

Hamon by Mitsufuji makes clothes with built in biometric scanning capabilities.

Silver fiber allows a small scanner attached to the outfit to take biometric readings and relay them in real time to your smart phone or the cloud. The readings taken by the scanner include heart rate, respiration, temperature, gyroscopic readings and more.

Mitsufuji raised just over US$27 million in funding in funds last week.

Tranzax

Crash Fever by Wonder Planet

Timetree by Jubilee Works

Dive into Japanese tech at #tiatokyo2017