VCs invest $25m in Japan's Plaid
Japanese digital marketing services provider Plaid has raised JPY1.5 billion ($25.1 million) from a group of VCs including existing investor Eight Roads Ventures Japan and Femto Partners.
New backers participating in the deal included Mitsui & Co, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, Mizuho Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital. The investment also included loans provided by Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
According to a release, the capital will be applied to a marketing push and the hiring of additional staff in mobile applications. It will also be used to create a scalable development framework for handling larger amounts of data as the company expands operations into new categories such as the real estate and financial industries.
Plaid was founded in 2011 and launched its flagship product, Karte, in 2015. Karte is billed as a one-stop service that provides enterprise clients with prompt analysis and real-time visualization of web site visitors' behavioral data on a per-person level. It is said to have 2.2 billion users and to generate JPY548 billion in annual sales.
Femto and Eight Roads, previously known as Fidelity Growth Partners, invested a combined JPY650 million in the company across two rounds. This included a seed-stage investment made by Femto in 2014 and a growth round from both investors worth about JPY500 million in 2015.
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