[The Bridge] Japan’s Uzabase to announce $4.5M funding to boost curated news business

Japan’s Nikkei reported this morning that Tokyo-based Uzabase, the startup behind curated news app NewsPicks and company/industry database service Speeda, will announce on September 1st that it has fundraised 470 million yen (or about $4.5 million) in a round led by Itochu Techology Ventures. Other participating investors in this round are YJ Capital, Kodansha (publishing company), Globis Capital Partners, SMBC Venture Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Shinsei Bank, GMO Venture Partners, and Monex Ventures (investment arm of Monex Securities). ...

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The Bridge  8/31/2014 [en]

memo

• News curation apps are the hottest field this year with large amount of fundraising by Gunosy and SmartNews. Compared with the two, Uzabase's 470 million yen seems quite few regardless of many remarkable investors. Different from the two major apps, NewsPicks focuses on comments by users rather than even news itself. Also NewsPicks focuses on economic news. The differentiation could enable the app get a certain number of sticky users even though the number of users could be fewer than other popular news apps.
• https://newspicks.com/