TOKYO, April 27, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Beatrust Inc., a Tokyo-based startup with the vision "to create a world where everyone can realize their potential" has raised 800 million Japanese yen (approx. 6.3 million US dollars; 1 US dollar = 127 Japanese yen) in a series A funding round from major Japanese and foreign angel investors.

JAFCO served as the lead investor, followed by new investors, Global Brain, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital. They were joined by angel investor William Lohse, who founded VC funds Social Starts, The Science of Health and Happiness, Joyance, and Delightful Moments, as well as being an early investor for Pinterest. Six additional investments were made by existing investors, including Itochu Technology Ventures, One Capital, CyberAgent Capital, Delight Ventures, PKSHA SPARX Algorithm #1, and Mizuho Capital.

With the support of new shareholders, Beatrust will further strengthen both product and sales structures, and accelerate functional development, including advancing infrastructure and security development especially for enterprise companies. In addition, we will increase speed in growing the team to research oversea markets and strengthen organizational structure.

About Beatrust

Beatrust is a Tokyo-based startup founded by two ex-Googlers in March 2020. Our mission is to visualize people’s experiences and strengths, and to create an environment where people can freely connect, collaborate and co-create.

We provide a talent collaboration platform "Beatrust" which is designed to accelerate autonomous collaboration among organizations. Beatrust currently provides two key features; Beatrust People, Beatrust Ask.

Beatrust Product

Beatrust is a collaboration platform. Its first product is "Beatrust People", which enables users to easily search and communicate with others by disclosing and sharing not only their skills and experience, but also their past career history. The second product, "Beatrust Ask", is an internal knowledge platform that stimulates communication and collaboration among users.

As the number of employees in an organization increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what each employee knows, can do, and can teach. This leads to a tipping point where the lack of communication results in lower engagement, increased cost of finding the right people, and a decline of opportunities for innovation. In addition to the current pandemic situation, new graduates and mid-career employees have even fewer opportunities to interact with colleagues and develop relationships.

Beatrust addresses these issues by visualizing and matching skills and experience of employees to improve internal engagement, lower communication costs, and solve business development challenges.

Beatrust has been particularly well received by enterprise companies with a large number of employees. As of March 2022, after a year of the product’s release, the number of users has exceeded 15,000, and is being used in a wide range of industries.

Our customers

• AGC Inc.
• LION Corporation
• SUMITOMO CORPORATION
• Konica Minolta Inc.
• KDDI CORPORATION
• TB Next Communications Co., Ltd.

In addition to the companies above, we have many customers in various industries; finance, real-estate, auto-manufacturing, IT, advertising etc which includes global business networks.

Beatrust is serving our service not only for companies located in Japan, and also looking for overseas companies and/or partners who are interested and committed to solving the organizational problems with us. We can provide English-based service, and be flexible to have communications considering the timezone gap.

If you have any interests for the trial or alpha testing of our service, please kindly reach out to us from the contact form.

Messages from investors

Mr. Atsushi Fujii – Partner at JAFCO Group Co., Ltd.

The "communication crisis" within organizations is serious. With the increase of mid-career hires, changes in work style values, and the pandemic, it is easy to for communication circles to shrink, where conversations only happen on a necessity basis. We expect the growth of Beatrust will facilitate the creation of value within our clients’ organizations.

Yasuhiko Yurimoto – President, Yuki Matsuo – Director at Global Brain Corporation

As companies promote hybrid work in the post pandemic era, new styles of communication and collaboration, including knowledge sharing, will become more challenging than ever before. We believe that Beatrust will become central to this movement, and are pleased to announce our support. We hope that this platform will grow to update corporate communication not only in Japan but in other countries around the world.

Ryo Imamura – Deputy Manager at Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co., Ltd.

We invested in Beatrust because we strongly empathize with the concept of encouraging autonomous collaboration and creating innovative organizations through the visualization of skills, careers, and personalities. MUFG will do its utmost to support the company by leveraging our network.

Katsutoshi Matsushita at SMBC Venture Capital

Enterprises today are facing numerous challenges such as declining competitiveness, work styles reforms, and shortage of labor. I strongly sympathized with Beatrust’s approach to solve these issues through communication with their functions and mechanisms. We invested in Beatrust for the potential growth of Beatrust’s team lead by Mr. Hara with his wealth of business experience, and look forward to fully supporting them.

Hirofumi Kondo – President at CyberAgent Capital Inc.

We are pleased to make an additional investment following our initial funding round in the summer of 2020. Since then, Beatrust has launched "Beatrust People" followed by "Beatrust Ask", which matches people within an organization. Now dozens of companies, mainly large corporations, have already adopted this system. This is the result of Mr. Hara and co-founder Mr. Kume’s management skills as well as the capability of "Team Beatrust", who built a product that was carefully thought out from the user’s perspective. We expect Beatrust will be a central figure in the wave of digital transformation, both in Japan and worldwide.

Contact information

Beatrust Inc.
Established in March 2020
Address : 3F AD Kanda Station Higashiguchi Building, 2-7-15 Kajicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
CEO : Kunio Hara
URL : https://beatrust.com/en

Please contact us from our website or the following email address.
POC : Masato Kume
Email : [email protected]