Shufti lands $5.75M to help Japanese housewives work from home

A website that helps Japanese housewives make money by working from home has just raised US$5.75 million from Minna no Wedding and Nissay Capital, reports The Bridge.

Shufti, in operation since 2007, turns housewives into freelancers. It utilizes a crowdsourcing model for its various job listings. Projects include data entry, taking surveys, writing reviews, transcribing audio, and more. Entering business card data, for example, pays 20 yen (US$0.18) per card and transcribing a ten-minute recording earns the worker 500 yen (US$4.50). The service boasts more than 76,000 registered users.

Shufti is one of six products offered by parent company Uluru – each of which focus on BPO (business process outsourcing) and crowdsourced data collection.

Why such a large sum for what may appear to be a niche service? When it comes to women in the workplace, Japan has been making headlines this year for all of the wrong reasons. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for an increase in female participation in the workforce, dubbed “Womenomics,” from the current 63 percent (among the lowest in OECD countries) to 73 percent by 2020. According to The Economist, after having children, a staggering 70 percent of women stop working for a decade or more. Add boredom and insufficient household wages, and Shufti could have a large pool of available workers.

Even with the dismal gender equality statistics, a 2013 survey revealed that a third of Japanese women ages 15 to 39 aspire to be full-time housewives. If this attitude takes hold, then Shufti will have no trouble when it comes to filling orders.

See: New crowdsourced jobs site helps Japanese mothers earn money without joining the rat race

Source: The Bridge