Tokyo-based Monstar Lab, the company providing crowdsourced offshore app development service Sekai Lab, announced on Friday that it has secured 250 million yen, which roughly translates to about US$2.5 million.

The round was participated from Gogin Capital, the investment arm of San-In Gogo Bank and Resona Capital, the private equity and venture capital arm of Resona Holdings, in addition to existing shareholders.This follows the company previous US$3.3 million funding from Pasonatech and DG Incubation.

Getting Gogin Capital on board as a shareholder may be related to the fact that Monstar Lab has a development location at the similar location of Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. This will thus provide the opportunity of offering existing offshore app development services, especially to help and improve the situation in and around Shimane where companies still struggle with the lack of system engineers.

Founded in December 2013 by Hiroki Inagawa, Sekai Lab is a solution to match Japanese companies with skilled engineers in Asian countries. In other words, Sekai Lab acts as a crowdsourcing platform which allows companies in Japan to find their entrusted development platform in affordable markets such as Vietnam, China, and Bangladesh, which makes up the top three in the list, to produce websites, apps, games, and other online services.

The startup also provides translation and localization services to ensure that language barriers will not be an issue. Additionally, the startup also claims that clients in Japan, Singapore, and the US can save up to 75 percent on development costs by outsourcing with Sekai Lab.

To date, Monstar Lab offers app development in 17 countries worldwide which include China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam but the startup still continues to further expand their markets. In October, the company’s CEO Hiroki Inagawa visited Jordan, and this hints at the possibility of expansion into the Middle East from Asia where they now have multiple development locations.

The funds raised this time will be used for such market expansion efforts. With its established international resources, Sekai Lab can provide comparatively inexpensive and high-quality offshore development for projects from Japan and elsewhere.

As its name implies, ‘Sekai’ which is translated to “the world” in Japanese shows the startup’s ambition in taking on the global market, in both name and deed. To change the world with its technology.

For more information, please visit https://monstar-lab.com/jp/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

Interana, the leader in interative behavioral analytics for the digital economy has announced last week that it has raised US$18 million in an oversubscibed funding round led by Vertex Ventures Holdings, a member of Temasek Holdings which focuses on venture capital investment opportunities in the IT and healthcare sector. The round was also participated by Battery Ventures, Data Collective, Allen Company, Fuel Capital and Index Ventures.

The new investments will bring Interana’s total funds raised to US$46.2 million and will be used to support the startup’s next phase of growth, that is to expand its customer base and make behavioral analytics broadly available to digitally transforming businesses. The startup current customer base includes digital leaders like Bing, Tinder, Reddit, Asana and Azure. Additionally, the proceeds will also be used to advance product development.

“Our mission is to put the power of interactive data exploration in the hands of everyone across todays’s digital businesses. The latest round of funding and powerhouse additions to Interana’s board will help make this vision for self-service behavioral analytics a reality,” said Ann Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of Interana.

With this development, the startup based in Redwood City, California also announced that it has appointed In Sik Rhee, a General Parner at Vertex Venture and Max Schireson, an executive-in-residence at Battery Ventures to the Interana Board of Directors.

The executive-in-residence at Battery Venture also made a comment, saying that as digital transformation continues to impact businesses, employees from the C-suite down must be able to explore the digital behavior patterns of people and things to make sound business decisions. In this case, Interana provides the solution of a new, iterative approach with big data sets in today’s highly dynamic business environment.

Interana’s behavioral analytics solution claims to fill a critical gap left by traditional business intelligence and simple clickstream reporting tools that provide simple metrics on the web and mobile services. These describes the limitations in their flexibility and scalability for companies when businesses need to answer more meaningful questions about digital behavior. Solving this, the company makes a software that replays massive volumes of events across large populations of actors that answer behavioral questions on a distributed proprietary back end.

“We’ve been invested in data for a long time. What’s very clear is that the benefits of data are not flowing to the business user, they are trapped with technologists,” said In Sik Rhee, the General Parnter at Vertex Ventures. “Most business users don’t know what information they want initially out of their vast data and often the first ideas are not the best. Figuring out better ways to ask the right questions of their data is an iterative process, and unlike other offerings that tout themselves as self-service but have many hidden intermediaries, Interana provides true self-service analytics, giving users that critical ability to ask questions without a gatekeeper. They are building a sustainable solution to disrupt a congested analytics market.”

For more information, please visit https://www.interana.com/

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

After two Chinese bike-sharing startups Ofo and Mobike raised a combined US$230 million in October, a third bike-sharing startup is now joining the bike-sharing bandwagon. Shanghai-based bike maker and bike-sharing app, Ubike has raised RMB150 million (an approximate US$22 billion) in its series A funding round to up its game.

The funding was led by a unit of Shenzhen-listed chemicals and trading firm – Jiangsu Huaxicun Co Ltd. While other companies that have also participated in the round include Black Hole Capital, Yicun Capital and existing investor Zhonglu Capital among others.

With the funds, Ubike plans to improve its bicycles’ design and quality to rival its competitors. The company claims that their bikes will be sturdier and easier to ride as a result of their partnership with Shanghai’s Yongjiu Group, one of China’s known pioneer in bicycle-making.

Besides, additional capitals will also be used to produce more bikes with a targeted goal of 100,000 bikes to be placed in Shanghai and other bigger cities as well. Mobike which was launched in December 2015 has 30,000 bikes in Shanghai while Ofo has 70,000 bikes in its bike-sharing platforms, reports said.

Last September, Ubike has raised up to RMB10 million (approximately US$1.6 million) in an angel round backed by Zhonglu capital. The company is also said to be launching its product officially in Shanghai, this November.

With this, the bike-sharing market in China has now becomes a three-way competition between Ofo, Mobike and Ubike. But nevertheless, with bike-sharing gaining popularity and developing fast in many cities in China, users will definitely benefit from it, particularly the young city dwellers.

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media

ToneTree is launching a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for its OAK augmented reality playground system. The ToneTree OAK dock is an Augmented Reality platform that can transform an iPhone into a table top playspace.

To work, the product brings together digital and physical toys to create an AR experience. Using it is simple, just place an iPhone on the OAK Dock, launch the OAK App, pick up an OAK Kit, and play.

OAK comes with a variety of kits that allows users to immerse themselves in AR experiences, whether it is flying through space, playing music or even to create a personal application. To date, there are four available OAK kits which are the Rockstar Kit, Explorer Kit, Gamer Kit and Developer Kit.

The Rockstar Kit allows the user to break into a jam session anywhere by simply placing the included pads down in front of OAK and play the instrument. While the Gamer Kit transforms the table into a battlefield as users can see their AR trading cards come to life as they place them in front of the OAK deck.

On the other hand, the Explorer Kit allows the user to drive their own toy spaceship to dodge asteroids and battle enemies as they explore the deep space. While the Developer Kit lets users create their own augmented reality apps.

Similar to the Osmo apps on the iPad, OAK uses patented computer vision technology to see and understand the space in front of your iPhone. The items included in the kits are called totems which are simple pads, cards, and plastic toys that OAK uses to control the virtual world. To detect movements, OAK also includes a laser in its base that detects when the user is interacting with totems.

Based in California, ToneTree is founded by Brian Cook, CEO; Ronald Sardarian, CTO; and Max Escaler, CMO from three different countries who roomed together at Rensselær Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Their idea – OAK came to life through an art project whereby the original idea was to turn the walls and floors of a building into an augmented reality musical instrument.

The team went through an accelerator program led by Intel Education. OAK will ship in August 2017.

For more information, please visit the OAK project at Kickstarter.

By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media