Tokyo-based Anglers, with a mobile fishing record application of the same name, has recently fundraised from 500 Startups Japan and mobile game developer Ignis, as well as other undisclosed individual investors.

The announcement was made on December 1 without disclosing the secured amount. This financing stage is considered an intermediate between the seed and Series A round and the fund is estimated to be at about tens of millions of yen, that is approximately hundreds of thousands of dollars).

500 Startups Japan managed to acquire these share options through the implementation of J-KISS stock acquisition rights system, the convertible notes based funding scheme published by the firm back in April, in collaboration with Masakazu Masujima and KPMG.

For Anglers, this fundraising is second to the angel round funding from Japanese angel investor Nobuyoshi Yamagishi conducted in December 2015.

Founded in October 2012, Angler is an application that allows users to self-motivate and improve by recording and share fishing outcomes. The company formerly known as FIXA Corporation has experimented with different policies and prototypes, before settling to launch the official version of the fishing-related Angler in July 2013.

This June, the firm revealed that the number of daily angling results registered topped 1,000 and the cumulative number of registered angling items reached 280,000 as well as a user base which exceeds 110,000 people.

The reason behind Anglers success in acquiring an overwhelmingly large number of angling results is said to be due to the app easy-to-use functions as a social media for information sharing among close friends to share pinpointed fishing spot information.

There is a need for angling information as Norio Fujii, the COO of ANGLERS explains, “Many of the angling news about where and what kinds of fish can be caught are still provided by angler hotels and are not consistent. Generally, anglers visiting his or her fishing spot anew want to obtain information about the spot in advance: which time frame to go or what kind of lure to use. On the other hand, angling requires fresh information,”

ANGLERS also regularly holds fishing competitions that can be joined through the app. Simply record the fishery caught within the time period and compete with the nation’s ANGLERS user for the record. Excellent records will get prizes provided by sponsors. The company in 2016 alone have held a total of 22 tournaments with 1000 participating users in the latest challenge.

With the money secured this time, ANGLERS will add a system for sharing angling results by area or time period. Also, the firm will start building a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace allowing users to sell the fish they have caught.

ANGLERS’ present source of income is mainly through event sponsorship from major fishing tackle manufacturers events as aforementioned. Looking to diversify the monetization methods, the firm also has an idea to implement functions enabling accommodation reservation of angler hotels or fishing agents seamlessly via the ANGLERS app.

“We are also thinking about advertisement models, inter-individual transaction services of fishery among others. Since fishing is going to take hours, fishing data that is well organized is in demand” Fujii said.

With this, the firm plans to establish a fishing tackle review website for ANGLERS, one similar to Sefuri’s climbing app Yamap which manages a climbing tool review website – Yamap Gears.

“Through fishing blogs, one will be able to get information on the types of fish and its location. Similarly, the value and pricing of the fish can be born from fishing data as well, automatically created by the application when backed up with sufficient data,” said Fujii.

Besides, the application will also include fishing analysis functions in the near future. That is once reaching the data necessary of about 100,000 per fish species will provide a correlation such as the possible type of fish to be caught along with the environmental data such as the water level.

With 500 Startups Japan as one of its investors, the firm backed by the U.S. parent also hinted the possibility of international development for the mobile application.

“In India or China, there are lots of people who are angling for their day-to-day meal. But, increasingly, the number of people who seek enjoyment in angling are also rising. And since the angler’s psychology of wanting to keep their favorite fishing spots hidden is the same around the world, we can impact the world by leveraging the know-hows in Japan,” said Fujii.

ANGLERS graduated from the second batch of Tokyo-based startup accelerator Movida Japan, along with Sefuri which is developing Yamap.

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

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ZEPL, an enterprise analytics company, has closed a US$ 4.1 million Series A funding round, led by Singapore-based Vertex Ventures. The round also saw participation from other investors which included Translink Capital, Specialized Types, and Big Basin Capital.

This funding round also debuted with a fresh new brand – ZEPL, similarly founded by the creators of Apache Zeppelin to replace the formerly known NFLabs.

“Our new brand identity, ZEPL – Zeppelin RELP – reflects our mission to provide an interface for modern day analytics workflow,” said Sejun Ra, the co-founder and CEO of ZEPL.

“For decades, enterprise analytics has been mired in silos – data silos, skill silos, team silos – that regardless of computational power, hindered speed and efficiency of analytics,” Sejun explains.

He continues, saying that “And though recent advances in Hadoop, Spark and other compute frameworks, alleviate some of the data silos issues, the myriad of choices further compounds the skill and team silos.”

In this case, Apache Zeppelin attempts to break down those walls providing a pluggable and open-source solution that enables data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to use and share the same interface to source, process and analyse various data types.

Besides, using its JDBC Interpreter, Apache Zeppelin supports a majority of the modern day frameworks, from Spark, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search as well as standard relational databases such as Oracle and MySQL.

The data product is also integrated and available with various services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Dataproc, as well as most of the major Haddop distributions.

“We have been watching the organic growth of Zeppelin for some time, and are incredibly impressed with the demand and adoption of the technology, by everyone from small teams to the largest Fortune 100 companies,” said In Sik Rhee, the General Partner of Vertex Ventures that will be joining ZEPL’s company board.

Vertex Ventures is a network of funds that invest in and guides technology companies to an exit event, with Singapore’s state investment fund Temasek Holdings as a primary limited partner (LP).

“Enterprises have been clamoring for a way to seamlessly apply analytics across their organization. The team at ZEPL has a clear vision to drastically change the way companies leverage analytics to further their business goals, and we are pleased to support them as they expand Zeppelin’s reach,” In Sik Rhee adds.

With this new funding, ZEPL looks forward to expanding the Apache Zeppelin experience to enable the delivery of a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.

According to ZEPL, Apache Zeppelin is fast becoming the standard big data visualization interface to explore and conduct deep data analysis. It also sees a significant adoption by corporate across different industry verticals, ranging from finance to high technology enterprises.

“Our mission is to transform the way people engage with data, and make big data analytics accessible and easy to use by anyone within an organization,” said Moon Soo Lee, creator of Apache Zeppelin and co-founder and CTO of ZEPL. “By building on top of Apache Zeppelin’s extensible, pluggable, open interface, we believe we can tear down the walls that currently limit how organizations leverage and communicate analytics.”

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Japan venture capital (VC) firm 31VENTURES has recently made an investment with Dronomy Ltd., an Isreali-based construction technology startup that provides a drone-based solution.

Mitsui Fudosan’s 31VENTURES has led the round along with other existing investors which include Battery Ventures, Lool Ventures, and Oryzn Capital which had also participated.

The announcement about the funding came on Friday, December 9 through the corporate VC fund – 31VENTURES Global Innovation Fund, an investment platform which is jointly operated by Global Brain Corporation for speedy investments.

No financial details were disclosed about this funding rounds. Though it is known that this funding round will allow the company to launch its solution into international markets and to ramp up its acquisition, starting Q1 2017.

Founded by two physicists interested in autonomous drone flight, current CEO Ori Aphek and VP of R&D Dr. Guy Raz, the venture identified the gap in the ability of construction companies to frequently and accurately monitor their construction sites.

The Tel Aviv startup leveraged upon this. providing the solution of a software company that builds actionable knowledge into construction projects through the analysis of unique and frequent project data collected by autonomous drones.

These pieces of information collected and analysed are shared via the cloud to relevant construction projects.

Commenting on the investment, Akira Sugawara, the GM of 31Ventures said, “It did not take us long to realise the outstanding business potential of Dronomy, which led us to make our first-ever investment in an Israeli technology company.

“The construction market, its challenges and the opportunities it encapsulates are well known to us. We were impressed to see how Dronomy and its remarkable team understand and address these challenges,” Sugarawa further adds.

Construction companies, developers, and subcontractors are beginning to realise the benefits of incorporating these unique technological solutions as part of their business processes.

With Dronomy, the process of mapping, monitoring, inspecting and sharing site details becomes an autonomous part of the daily site routine, leading to reduce in ever-occurring project delays, exceeding cost budgets, and disputes.

These can account for a significant percentage of a project’s overall costs. Besides, construction companies can also use Dronomy to build a knowledge corpus that can be shared over the cloud to all relevant stakeholders.

“We are consistently receiving extraordinary feedback from customers who experience what our solutions can do for them. This is now ratified by one of the world’s largest players in our market,” said Ori Aphek, the Founder and CEO of Dronomy.

“Our ability to make consumer drones fly low and close to construction sites, capture the right visual data, translate it into knowledge, and appropriately deliver this knowledge is what makes us different,” Aphek adds.

In September 2015, Dronomy has raised US$ 1.5 million funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from other VC fimrs and angel investors.

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media