Mumbai: Sansan, Inc., the parent company of the Eight app, Japan’s leading business card organizer and professional social networking platform has raised approx. INR 186 crores (USD 26.43 million) in Series-E funding, taking funding to date to approx. INR 7,050 crores (USD 100 million). Sansan’s Series E investment was led by Japan Post Capital, T. Rowe Price, SBI Investment, and DCM Ventures. The additional funding will help Sansan deliver on its new mission: “Turning encounters into innovation.” The company aims to accelerate its development of innovative technologies centered around maximizing the utility of business cards.
Eight is Japan’s largest professional social networking platform. The app has well over 2 million registered users. The Eight app uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven technologies to accurately digitize users’ business cards and helps connect users with their business contacts through a social media framework that transforms business cards into actionable business connections. Having launched in India late last year, the app already has good number of downloads and is slowly expanding its on-ground presence in major cities, starting from Mumbai.
“Professional social networking is gaining momentum in the world”, says Edward Senju, Executive Producer of Eight. He added, “Our vision is to build an innovative global product that enables people to grow their encounters and businesses along with it. With the upcoming trend of building business communities and offline networking gaining more importance again, we aim to bring innovation to help people engage professionally and efficiently. We are thrilled to receive this new round of funding, which will enable us to work better on our new mission, ‘Turning Encounters into Innovation’. The intersection of communication and technology is rapidly evolving, and we are excited to have investors putting their trust in our work.”
Overview of Funding Companies
SBI Investment
SBI Investment is a subsidiary of SBI Holdings that actively engages in venture capital investment in growth fields. The company participated in this round of funding through the AI & Blockchain fund it manages.
Japan Post Capital
Japan Post Capital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Post, which primarily focuses on investing. The firm supports the growth of Japanese venture businesses through the network and brand power of the Japan Post Group and invests in companies with high growth potential.
T. Rowe Price
T. Rowe Price is an independent asset management company based in Maryland, USA. The firm manages assets totaling over USD 1 trillion and currently does business in 16 countries worldwide. It manages Japanese stocks through its representative office in Japan.
DCM Ventures
DCM is a venture capital firm with over USD 4 billion invested in early and mid-stage startups with an innovative approach. The firm supports entrepreneurs through practical management advice, global business network and funding.
Funding Overview
As a cloud-based contact management service for businesses, Sansan converts business cards lying dormant within companies into actionable data. While proprietary OCR software is used to instantly digitize each card, actual staff also check each and every card to confirm accuracy. This gives Sansan an unrivalled accuracy rate of 99.9%.
Apart from Eight, Sansan also offers a B2B service which is deployed in over 7,000 companies globally, mostly large businesses, and it has achieved a status as must-have business infrastructure for its clients.
With this Series-E round of funding, Sansan will accelerate its business growth to fulfill the new mission of ‘turning encounters into innovation’ via the combination of new data science, machine learning, and associated technologies. This latest round of funding takes the cumulative total of capital to approximately 11.4 billion yen (approximately INR 707 crore).
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