Japanese HR tech startup Laboratik closes $2m pre-series A

Tokyo-based HR tech startup Laboratik has raised US$2 million in a pre-series A round from new backers Deepcore and global creative group Party. Existing investors Archetype Ventures, Mizuho Capital, Eltes Capital, and Artesian also participated in the round.

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In addition to the funding, Laboratik also announced that Sou Hotta, the co-founder of Vietnamese AI product developer Cinnamon, has joined the team as vice president of engineering. Humanyze founder and MIT Media Lab visiting researcher Ben Waber was also appointed as an advisor to the startup.

Founded in July 2015, Laboratik develops team analytics products and services using natural language processing. It plans to use the new funds to further develop its offerings and strengthen its sales efforts in Japan and in its international markets.

The startup said it aims to help companies effectively manage and understand their teams, especially as workplace chat applications and remote work opportunities have become more commonplace.

Its flagship product, We, analyzes workplace chat interactions and automatically generates team engagement visuals, which can then be used to identify internal communication conditions and problems. The product, which is still in beta stage, has already been used in dozens of companies and by thousands of users, the company said.

Laboratik’s earlier service, A, is a bot that integrates with team communication tool Slack. It measures team conditions as well as quantifies the amount of each member’s chat communication and analyzes the users’ emotional tendency using NLP.

The company had previously raised US$800,000 in a seed round led by Archetype Ventures, according to Crunchbase. It also secured US$100,000 in an angel round in 2017 and US$200,000 in debt financing in 2016.