Seed investor, Samurai Incubate sets up second fund /TechCrunch Japan

Samurai Incubate operates Samurai Fund which is one of the seed accelerator emerging recently in Japan. With small amount of investment, it supports startups. From the first fund launched in 2009, it invests in nine startups including Anydoor, social translation service, Conyac operator, Nobot, smartphone ads network, Sassor, energy consumption management tool for electric appliances, and Rei Frontier, operating Lala Colle, location-based social application using AR.

Each amount of investment is very small like several hundreds of million yen and the total amount of fund is also small as 51.5 million yen. The second fund (62 million yen) is announced to be set up to continue the investment activity. It says to invest 10 startups within this March.

TechCrunch Japan 1/31/2011

memo

• Seed accelerators, investing small amount and incubating at very early stage, are increasing.
• Other incubators are mostly established by successful Internet companies such as GMO, CyberAgent and Digital Garage.