Oneteam, a new workplace chat app, gets $500k seed funding months before it even launches

There are dozens of workplace chat apps out there, but there still seems to be room for new entrants. One of the newest of these, Oneteam, announced today that it has secured seed funding just three months after starting up – and before the product is even launched into closed beta.

Oneteam, which is based in Japan, received JPY 60 million (US$500,000) from CyberAgent Ventures.

Once it’s launched, Oneteam will be comprised of a Profile Book that can import profiles from Facebook and LinkedIn so that workers might know each other better. The other aspect is the communication platform – basically a chat app – that works across web, iOS, and Android. The latter will open in closed beta in August, after the Profile Book begins testing next month.

Oneteam will launch to Japanese enterprises as well as Southeast Asian markets, co-founder and CEO Akira Sasaki tells Tech in Asia. Oneteam’s homepage is already in English, signaling that it’s looking globally from day one.

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Once it’s out in the wild, Oneteam will run into a ton (or a shit-ton, to use the metric equivalent) of competitors. There’s Convo, Slack, Flowdock, Zulip, and Cotap, to name but five of the post-Yammer services that spring to mind.

Slack is the most talked about (over-hyped?) of the bunch, and has raised US$340 million, making it a new startup unicorn.

Other Japanese startups are working on this too. Chatwork last month secured US$2.5 million in series A funding, while Typetalk is already going global despite being run from a second-tier city far from Tokyo.

“In Japanese corporations, an increasingly diverse workforce is leading to more consideration being given to alternate work styles, with the recognition that traditional desktop computer-oriented offices need to change the ways they communicate,” says the Oneteam crew in a statement today. They add that Southeast Asian enterprises are hampered by a frequent lack of a workplace intranet and a tendency to use free email services for communication – two problems the Japanese startup is hoping to solve as it tackles a culturally diverse and fast-growing region.

Oneteam’s goal for year’s end is 100 corporate customers and 10,000 accounts.