5 rising startups in Japan

Last week saw a brace of acquisitions with Line grabbing Gatebox creator Vinclu and Mercari buying fellow online shopping app Zawatt. Funding was also brisk as two firms announced deals worth more than US$10 million.

Full details below:

Cogent Labs

Photo credit: Pixabay .

Cogent Labs nabbed US$11.4 million in a series A deal from SBI Investment and Toppan Forms. Its feature product, Tegaki is a tool that scans documents and turns handwriting into digital text like what you are reading now. It claims 99.3 percent accuracy in the process. The startup can handle Japan’s complex writing system of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Western-style alphabet and numbers are also fair game, meaning Tegaki is likely to entertain international expansion.

Nightley

Photo credit: Pixelkult.

Nightley will be helping Japanese companies figure out where tourists physically are. The startup offers Inbound Insight, a tool that scrapes social networks like Twitter and Sina Weibo for gender, location, and nationality data. It also analyzes what people are saying about the places they are visiting. This data can be used by clients to make their businesses more appealing to tourists and increase revenue.

SMBC Venture Capital, Nissay Capital, and Legend Partners all chipped into a US$1.1 million series A round. In a year and a half since the service launched, it has gained 4,300 firms as users.

Umami

Photo credit: Unique Hotels

Umami is another startup built on Japan’s burgeoning tourism industry. It offers a chatbot – Tripla – that services like hotels and restaurants can use to provide concierge support for non-Japanese guests. Terms of its latest deal were not disclosed. KNT-CT, a company founded in 1941 that currently includes several tourism firms among its holdings, was the only announced investor.

The latest round comes after Umami raised a total of US$615,000 in a series of seed fundings last year in (May, June, and August). For visitors to Japan, the company also offers a handy app for iOS and Android.

Panair

Photo credit: Nick Page

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