Sunbridge Invests In Japanese Start-ups Wondershake and Midokura

Sunbridge, a Tokyo- and Sunnyvale-based tech incubator/VC firm founded by Oracle Japan’s former president Allen Miner, unveiled on Friday that it has invested in two Japanese start-ups, Wondershake and Midokura. The firm has not disclosed exactly how much it has invested, but some news media including CNET Japan report it was several million yen for each.

Wondershake won the grand prix at TechCrunch Japan’s start-up pitch event in April, where Allen Miner served as the chair of judges. The start-up raised funds from Cyber Agent Ventures on the same day. Now the Wondershake team has moved to San Francisco and are working on registration as a US company.

Sunbridege will invest in a form of convertible notes to avoid increasing the valuation with the investment, and make it easier for the start-up to get additional fundraising from potential US investors in the future. (Refer to our previous article for more on Wondershake)

Meanwhile, Midokura is a cloud enabling tech company and funraised 100 million yen in its seed round from some VC firms including NTT Investment Partners and datacenter company Bit Isle.

Sunbridge's Allen Miner (left) and Wondershake's Hitoshi Suzuki (right) at Teclosion 2011 Spring

The company was co-founded by the former COO of Globis, a private MBA schooling company in Tokyo. Japanese legendary techpreneur Kiyoshi Nishikawa (the founder of NetAge) is also involved in the board of directors. During the past few months we’ve heard from some of the company’s team that they are developing the alpha version of some cloud-related apps, but no further details are available at this point.  We’ll keep you posted if we hear anything.

Update: Wondershake just announced the total amount of this fundraising from several investors including Sunbridge was 360,000 US dollars. (Their announcement, in Japanese)