Littel, search technology startup, is acquired by NEXT, real estate portal site operator with 286.4M yen/Venture Now

Littel announced that it has concluded to transfer shares to NEXT, Japan's largest real estate information portal, HOME's, operator to become a wholly owned subsidiary.

Littel was founded in 2007 April from University of Tokyo. It commercializes advanced technologies related to natural language processing and information navigation which have been developed at University of Tokyo. Currently, the startup develops and sells products automatically providing items or information that users want as well as provides solution service to support to develop Hadoop, large scale distributed processing platform.

NEXT aims to be a global company with DB + CCS, or database plus communication and concierge service. In order to realize the target, it considers Littel's technology to be very beneficial and decided to acquire the startup.

Venture Now 1/19/2011


memo

• Other two startups backed by University of Tokyo got Innovation Winner Award at iEXPO 2010, business plan contest in Silicon Valley
•  Phyzios, web contents and iPhone game developer
•  Morpho, image processing technology
• Even though the exit price is not a particular success, the university's venture incubation activities are yielding a certain results.