Japan's J-Star agrees IT jobs platform acquisition

The management supported carve-out from parent company M-OUT, a business consulting services provider, represents the first deal from J-Star’s fourth middle-market fund, which closed in November at the hard cap of JPY48.5 billion ($443 million). The fund is mandated to write checks in a range of JPY1-3 billion.

Gino claims its Paiza portal is the largest site of its kind in Japan. The service has 300,000 users, which equates to about 75% of IT engineers in the country. Job search functions include tools that allow employers to evaluate candidates by viewing their program coding work. It also includes functions for learning and developing programming skills.

J-Star cited government data that indicates a shortfall of IT professionals in Japan would increase from 170,000 in 2015 to 590,000 in 2030 against a backdrop of an aging population and expanding IT needs. According to a statement, the PE firm will support Gino’s efforts to create an industry standard for the visualization of IT skill proficiency testing and career development processes.

J-Star No. 4 targets control or co-control stakes in domestic lower middle-market companies with a strong focus on platform-based segment consolidations and leveraging various consumption and industrial themes in Japan’s demographics-driven macro environment.

“All traditional types of media and broadcasting business are declining, so a lot of marketing is shifting toward websites,” Satoru Arakawa, a partner at J-Star told AVCJ last year. "There are so many small companies in digital media services that are essentially start-ups that cannot IPO. We can easily differentiate these companies by combining them and scaling them to be more competitive.”

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Consumer
• Support services
• Buyouts
• Japan
• J-Star
• TMT
• professional services