Tokyo-based From Scratch, the startup behind integrated digital marketing platform known as b→dash, announced on Tuesday that it has secured 3.2 billion yen (about US$28.4 million) in its Series C funding round.
This latest financing round saw participation from Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), Rakuten Ventures, and existing investors.
The round follows their previous 300 million yen funding in May 2015 and 1 billion yen (about US$8.3 million) funding in November of the same year.
This would bring the cumulative funds raised by the startup to a total of 4.5 billion yen (about US$40 million) to date.
Founded in 2010, the startup’s flagship product is B→dash is a web-based marketing platform that allows a company to integrate data from different points of their entire marketing process and analyze it comprehensively on a single platform.
The software provides an all-in-one function, where it will not only, but also integrate, process and utilize data relevant to marketing, such as user data, advertisement data and purchase data to help companies with their marketing process.
The startup serves major clients including Kirin Brewery and Okasan Online Securities.
From Scratch will use the funds to enhance the marketing platform, especially by strengthening data integration and data processing capability, in addition to further develop artificial intelligence technologies to provide highly accurate predictive functions, such as which sales rep should be appointed to which customers.
For strengthening the data processing capacity, Yasuhiro Abe, a representative of From Scratch said that, “It is ascertained that the marketing platform will move to the cloud in the near future, however there is still a problem of low data processing capability which hinders the movement.”
To solve this problem, Abe adds that the company will conduct R&D to realize technologies that can instantaneously process large amounts of data on the cloud.
In another development, From Scratch is also looking to develop a new marketing platform at an appropriate price range for SMEs and B2B companies.
By Vivian Foo, Unicorn Media
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