Founded just four months ago, Tokyo-based BeaTrust has raised a JPY 300 million (approximately $ 2.83 million) seed round for its business collaboration platform. The startup's ambitious goal is to change the corporate culture at large Japanese companies before expanding to other countries.
The round came from CyberAgent Capital; DNX Ventures; ITOCHU Technology Ventures; STRIVE; A capital; Delight Ventures; PKSHA / SPARX 1st algorithm; and Mizuho Capital, along with individual undisclosed participants.
The BeaTrust platform allows employees of large companies to discover colleagues in different departments with similar interests and skills and provides them with tools to work together on projects.
The startup's co-founders, Kunio Hara and Masato Kume, met while working for Google in Japan. Prior to Google, Hara held positions in Tokyo and Silicon Valley at Sumitomo Corporation, Softbank, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft, while Kume worked at Asatsu-DK. During their tenure at Google, the two focused on helping Japanese startups scale using Google's tools.
Hara told ProWellTech that BeaTrust was inspired by her experience working at companies in the United States and Japan, and by the time of co-founders at Google, where they discovered that collaboration between departments was an intrinsic part of the culture. The two began to think about how to bring the same qualities to large Japanese companies.
"From the perspective of Google employees, working there is like a way of life. We work together and think about how to facilitate intercultural innovation among employees, and that needs communication and a digital infrastructure to support these ideas. "said Hara.
BeaTrust wants to transform the Japanese corporate culture, which Hara described as "very isolated and top-down, with very strict rules", making it more difficult for people in different teams or departments to communicate or even get to know each other. "There are many initiatives to hire talented people, but it's not an environment that helps people connect with each other and ask each other for help, which is what leads to new projects," he added.
The platform is currently in closed beta, testing with three late stage startups that have approximately 100-200 employees each. Its first feature is employee profiles that list skills and experience. Next, BeaTrust will launch tools to allow users to view how their company's teams are organized and modules to enable collaboration on different types of projects, including software development.
BeaTrust's founders said that as the platform grows, its target audience will be large enterprises with thousands of employees. The platform is not meant to replace Slack, which launched in Japan three years ago, or other business communication tools like Microsoft Teams or ChatWork, but it serves as a complement, Kume said. Slack and its competitors are intended to enable individual teams within large companies to collaborate, while BeaTrust is designed to help employees discover and establish working relationships with colleagues they don't yet know.
Although its initial goal is to reshape corporate culture in Japan, BeaTrust's founders are also looking at expansion into European and Asian countries and markets where large corporations continue to enforce or encourage remote working due to the COVID pandemic. -19.
"This is becoming imperative for us because what we hear from many large companies is that employees are not used to working remotely, so they have to think about how to change their lifestyle and continue employee innovation," he said. Kume.
