500 Startups Japan announces its first two investments

James (left) and Yohei of 500 Startups Japan.

500 Startups Japan announced the first two investments today from its US$30 million fund: Spacee and Pocket Concierge.

The fund was announced last September at Tech in Asia’s Tokyo conference. It is led by James Riney, the previous principal investor of DeNA’s corporate venture firm, and former Nomura Securities researcher Yohei Sawayama.

As a founder himself, James has been vocal about supporting the Japanese ecosystem and often talks about the less than US$1.5 billion invested per year in startups for Japan – which is basically like a single fund in Silicon Valley.

Although the funding amount is undisclosed this round, James has previously said that investments will be somewhere in the range of US$100,000 to $500,000 and in a few cases up to US$1 million.

Get your share on

The Spacee team and 500 Startups Japan.

One of the first two investments is in Spacee, which helps companies rent out unused meeting rooms.

In the afternoon in Japan, cafes are full of businessmen sipping coffee and meeting with clients. Spacee is a web app that helps users move away from coffee shops and book open meeting rooms in nearby offices starting from around US$5 per hour.

Meeting room owners can set available times, prices, and choose who to lend space to after passing a quick virtual inspection. There is no listing fee and Spacee handles all payments. Recently Spacee has also expanded into renting empty karaoke boxes as well as open classrooms for meetings, so if your next investment meeting isn’t going well you can quickly recover with a song.

The sharing economy is developing in Japan but the notion of Japanese privacy may be a hurdle. Most Japanese balk at the idea of sharing things with strangers and do not like giving personal information.

A survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (PDF) last year showed that nearly 80 percent of people in Japan are not interested in services like Airbnb or Uber. People cite concerns over problems like accidents that may occur and requiring too much private information for joining services. That’s not to say things are not changing and that Spacee will not have rivals.

Fellow Japanese start up Spacemarket offers similar services of reserving unused spaces with everything from meeting rooms to even entire theme parks. And in terms of privacy, it does not get much more personal than sharing mommies. Startup AsMama connects parents to share babysitting or driving kids to activities.

James said in an email that he is excited for the potential large number of repeat customers, “people use meeting rooms multiple times a day, so if they are happy with their experience, they tend to come back over and over again,” he explains. It looks like things have been going well for Spacee. According to its press release, the service has been used by over 250,000 people since launching in October 2013 and currently has 550 spaces available for meetings.

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