Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
On the heels of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek making a huge splash in OpenAI’s American backyard, OpenAI is diving into expanding in Asia, with major commercial deals that will also help it train its AI on more Asian-language content and user behavior — a gateway to doing more business in these markets in the future […]
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The round was led by KKR and Teachers' Ventures Growth, an investment arm of Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
OpenAI is expanding to Japan, announcing today a new Tokyo hub and plans for a GPT-4 model optimized specifically for the Japanese language. The ChatGPT-maker opened its first international office in London last year, followed by its inaugural European Union (EU) office in Dublin a few months later. Tokyo will represent OpenAI’s first office in Asia […]
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Asia countries this week, said in a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Thursday that Meta wants to beef up its cooperation with Samsung Electronics for AI chips to offset geopolitical risk issue in Taiwan, where TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chip manufacturer, is headquartered. […]
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SoftBank is backing Japanese robotics startup Telexistence, making good on the tech giant’s recent pledge to go back on the investment offensive in light of the current AI hype.
Tokyo-based Telexistence said Thursday that it has raised $170 million (23 billion yen) in a Series B round of funding from SoftBank, Airbus Ventures, Monoful Partners, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, a fund set up by Foxconn and CTBC Financial Holdings, and Globis Capital Partners.
Founded in 2017, Telexistence develops AI-powered robotic arms for the retail and logistics industry. Last year, the company deployed its robots in 300 FamilyMart convenience stores across Japan.
The company will use its fresh capital to bolster its workforce globally, CEO Jin Tomioka said in a statement. But aside from the funding, Telexistence is also announcing a strategic partnership with SoftBank Robotic Group, a unit of SoftBank Group, to ramp up its commercialization in North America. Moreover, the startup said it will work with Foxconn to produce its next-generation robot, called “Ghost.”
SoftBank Robotic Group’s Kenichi Kent Yoshida, and Globis Capital Partners’ Ryohei Nomoto will join Telexistence’s board of directors as a result of their investment.
SoftBank has been more than a little bullish about investments in the robotics realm, having backed California-based Bear Robotics back in 2020. Via the Softbank Vision Fund 2, it has also made investments in Shanghai-based Keenon Robotics, which specializes in developing service robots, and Opentrons, a medical testing robot developer.
SoftBank backs Japanese robotics startup Telexistence in $170M funding round by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
The pandemic has damaged the entire manufacturing supply chain, which is not likely to return to normal until at least 2024 due to a few challenges, including the ongoing U.S.-China tech battle. According to a recent survey by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), which surveyed more than 150 equipment manufacturing firms and 179 equipment manufacturing executives, 98% of the respondents still are facing the supply chain issue and more than half are experiencing worsening supply chain conditions owing to a labor shortage and access to source intermediate components.
Today, a startup called CADDi, which operates a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace for the manufacturing industry, said it has raised $89 million in a Series C round, bringing its total capital to $164 million, to scale its business and help those equipment manufacturing players.
Existing investors Globis Capital Partners, DCM Ventures, Global Brain, World Innovation Lab, JAFCO and Minerva Growth Partners participated in the Series C financing along with four new investors, including SMBC Venture Capital and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital.
CADDi did not provide its post-valuation but said the valuation had been up from its previous funding. In 2021, TechCrunch reported that its valuation was estimated at $450 million at its Series B funding, citing sources familiar with the deal.
Since its last fundraising, the number of employees has more than doubled from 250 to 590 globally, and the startup launched a new platform called CADDi Drawer, an artificial intelligence-powered cloud service for managing drawing data, last June.
Yushiro Kato (CEO), a former consultant at McKinsey & Company, and Aki Kobashi (CTO), who previously worked for Lockheed Martin and Apple, co-founded CADDi in 2017. The startup now offers two major solutions: CADDi Manufacturing, a parts procurement platform, and CADDi Drawer.
CADDi deals with mid-volume production and high-mix, low-volume production manufacturers, also known as make-to-order manufacturing, in which manufacturers produce products after confirmed orders. But the problem is consumers cannot get optimal pricing with low- to mid-volume production manufacturers due to volume constraints.
The outfit says the CAADi Manufacturing platform eliminates some procurement work and aggregates orders to help find similar materials, processes and suitable delivery schedules. It enables customers to access optimal prices with a 99.83% on-time delivery rate and a 99.96% non-defective rate yielding, Kato said in an email interview. It also allows manufacturers’ procurement costs to reduce by nearly 20%.
CADDi Drawer offers access to “all procurement data” and details that impact quality, cost and delivery (QCD); its platform also enables users to save significant time and costs while allowing manufacturers to improve QCD with more drawings created. Since April, the CADDi Drawer team has worked with the AI team to handle the information.
“Because of the difficulty of access [drawings], drawings are often recreated or just not found, which means keys to improving QCD, the KPI for manufacturing professionals, are never unlocked,” Kato said. “So, instead of more drawings providing more improvement, it’s almost like the data is never saved, and people are forced to start from scratch every time.”
CADDi claims it works with 70% of Japan’s top 20 industrial equipment manufacturers (by revenue) for CADDi Manufacturing. For CADDi Drawer, its customers include Tokyo Electron and EBARA.
It will use the proceeds to enhance CADDi manufacturing and CADDi Drawing and expand its workforce in the U.S., aiming to reach its goals of posting $10 billion in revenue from CADDi manufacturing and $1 billion in revenue from CADDi Drawer by 2030.
Some of the pains in the procurement industry in the U.S. are similar to those in Japan, Kato said, citing not only labor shortages in the manufacturing sector but also many ongoing mergers and acquisitions. But factories are not integrated well on account of different systems and standards, Kato noted.
“We can expand into the U.S. by leveraging [our] knowledge and technology that have developed since our inception, primarily in Japan and across a variety of manufacturing industries,” Kato said.
The Japan-headquartered company recently opened an office in the U.S. and supplier operations in Mexico to cater to clients in the U.S. In Asia, CADDi has offices in Vietnam and Thailand.
CADDi raises $89M Series C to scale its B2B supply chain marketplace for manufacturing parts by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
Thinking of Japan often evokes notions of bleeding-edge tech mixed with deep tradition and culture. The country’s startups, however, haven’t seen the sort of growth that upstart tech companies in other parts of the world have. There are signs that those tides are turning, though, with startup funding increasing along with the number of active domestic venture capital firms. The Japanese government has also promised enthusiastic support to boost the startup ecosystem in an effort to ramp up annual startup investments tenfold to 10 trillion yen ($71.5 billion) by 2027.
2022 was a record year for the Japanese VC market, in stark contrast to global VC investments trending downward. Even in the first quarter of 2023, Japanese VC investment slightly increased owing to active seed and Series A funding deals; but later-stage funding was tough for startups, per a report by KPMG.
Gen Isayama, co-founder and CEO of World Innovation Lab, said this might be because “most of Japan’s startups are early-stage startups that tend to be isolated from periods of economic uncertainty and downturns — a function of being seven to 10 years from the time of the IPO.”
Startups in Japan received 877.4 billion yen ($6.2 billion) in 2022, up from 850.8 billion yen ($6 billion) in 2021, per a recent report by Initial. The amount of funding raised by Japan-based startups was estimated at $625 million in 2013, the report said. To put this in context, startups in New York alone raised $2.9 billion in 2013.
We spoke to investors who actively invest in Japanese startups to get a better understanding of how the startup scene in Japan has changed from before and after the pandemic and their following plans.
The money managers are optimistic despite uncertain macroeconomics, which could have a limited impact on Japan’s startup ecosystem, and geopolitical risks between the U.S. and China, which could benefit Japan. However, they pointed out that later-stage funding would still be challenging for startups in the country in 2023.
“The decline is happening in all markets [in the world] and at all stages … the impact on Japan is somewhat limited, but it is also true that Japan is a smaller market compared to its GDP and should be growing much more,” said the CEO of Sony Ventures Corporation Gen Tsuchikawa.
“There have been two things that have benefited Japan recently. One is that the rising concerns around China have caused investors to look at neighboring Japan as a more predictable alternative,” said James Riney, founding partner and CEO of Coral Capital. “Another is Warren Buffet’s investment in and endorsement of Japan. Many investors seemed to be listening to the Oracle of Ohama and locking in on Japan’s opportunities.”
Although global macroeconomics doesn’t help at this time, Japan is gearing up to accelerate its startup scene.
“We expect the amount of funding to increase with the government’s support,” said Tsuyoshi Ito, CEO of Beyond Next Ventures. “The Japanese government has designated 2022 as the ‘First Year of Startup Creation’ and announced a five-year plan to foster startups, which includes a record amount of approximately 1 trillion yen in startup support measures.”
“Large Japanese corporations have slowed down quite a bit in recent years. Startups and their innovation can help boost the Japanese economy one more time,” said Anis Uzzaman, founder and chief executive of Pegasus Tech Ventures. “… the current government’s initiative can help the country prepare and get ready for the next challenge and give birth to lots of startups.”
We spoke with:
(Editor’s note: The following surveys have been edited for length and clarity. These answers are strictly limited to Japan and do not encompass all of Asia.)
We’re seeing a significant drop in VC funding in Asia’s first quarter this year. How has your VC investment strategy changed along with the market condition?
Our strategy has not shifted per se. Yes, the market is slowing down, but the top companies will always have something to offer. For example, according to the STARTUP DB ranking, the top 10 Japan deals in Q1’23 raised more money (59.2B yen) than the top 10 deals in Q1’22 (53.1B yen). Even during the VC funding boom, we were strategic and cautious and tried to pursue companies with what we found to be good intrinsic value instead of paying inflated valuations, and we plan on doing that going forward as well.
What caused the lowest funding in Asia since 2021? Do you think the VC funding will continue to decline this year? What are your prospects regarding funding volumes in Asia in 2023 and 2024? And do you expect it will bounce back anytime soon?
We are facing increasing uncertainty around the world. The rise in geopolitical risks, such as the Ukraine invasion and all-time high U.S.-China tensions, as well as increasing interest rates and uncertainty about economic stability, are all leading people and firms across the board to be more cautious about how they deploy their money.
6 investors explain why they are bullish about Japan’s startup scene despite an uncertain economy by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch