Japan’s Social Restaurant Finder ‘Retty’ Raises $1.2 Million, Starts Global Expansion

Japanese social gourmet site/ restaurant finder Retty just announced that it has raised a total of $1.2 million from GREE Ventures, NTT Investment-Partners, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. The startup has not disclosed  how many shares were allocated to each of the investors.

Until today, the service has acquired about 90,000 users, and 90,000 restaurant entries. This means it has a larger collection than other Japanese gourmet sites such as Hotpepper and GuruNavi, Retty CEO Kazuya Takeda says.

Similarly to the ‘like’ button on Facebook, the service has a button on each of restaurant entry which allows you to say that you’d like to dine there. Users have performed this action more than 400,000 times, and it’s growing at 130 percent each monthly.

Using the fund, they expect to increase their staff, intensify development and marketing efforts, and also to start international business expansion in the US and Singapore. As for the rest of Asia, that will start around the spring of 2013.

Readers may remember last year when we reported that Retty raised $285,000 from Cyber Agent Ventures as their first round of funding.

Retty's English version (currently under development)