Sansan the Business Card Management Platform raises $ 16.9 Million
Sansan, one of Japan’s cloud-based business card management services, today announced it has secured SGD 24.2 million (USD 16.9 million) in Series C funding to accelerate its product innovation and international business growth. The latest round of funding includes investments from Silicon Valley based DCM Ventures, with the participation of Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce global corporate investment group, and Nissay Capital. These venture capital firms focus their investments in mobile, Internet, software and services sectors and have financed Sansan previously to optimize the latter’s product offering and to take the Sansan’s business out of Japan to international markets, starting with the USA and Singapore.
The company will use the added capital to enhance its reach in Singapore, develop its product offering with a strong emphasis on mobile strategy, as target users build their sales strategies on mobile. Additionally, it plans to open the platform to connect to other enterprise services expanding user base beyond SMEs to include large businesses.
Chika Terada, Founder and CEO of Sansan says, “The world is getting smarter and businesses that create and add the most value will thrive. Sansan’s mission is “creating a resource from everyday business encounters and transforming the way the world works”. From the newly raised capital we will invest SGD 4.2 million (USD 3 million) in the Singapore market in 2016 to reach out to more companies that could benefit from using our platform. In Singapore, we pin our hopes on tapping a large pool of SMEs that are rapidly going digital and adopting cloud-based solutions to enhance productivity, better manage costs, and most importantly to effectively engage their customers, build loyalty, and ultimately, grow the business.”
According to Statistics Singapore, there were approximately 187, 700 SMEs by the end of 2014. The number makes up 99 per cent of the island state’s total enterprises and contributes to nearly half (48 per cent) of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Mr Terada adds, “Sansan wants to seize this extraordinary market opportunity and this fresh funding will help us move with faster strides in realising our vision and passion. With the infusion of new capital, we want to place mobile as our top priority, as well as enhance our platform ecosystem to integrate with more CRM tools that can be used by MNCs and government.”
Osuke Honda, General Partner, DCM Ventures says, “Since our last financing, Sansan has been rapidly growing in Japan market, and raised brand awareness in the US and Singapore, DCM is confident that with Sansan team’s expertise and product set, Sansan can certainly be the leader in contact/business relationship management space. DCM will continue to support Sansan’s global growth.”
Sansan’s funding boost comes on the heels of a strong demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions among businesses of all sizes in the Asia Pacific and Japan region. According to research analyst firm Gartner, CRM software solutions in emerging markets of Asia/Pacific saw the fastest growth of 18.7 per cent in 2014, while the mature Asia/Pacific regions that saw a healthy progression that was continued from strengthening its infrastructure for cloud/SaaS deployments. Gartner further shares the worldwide CRM market grew by 13.3 per cent in 2014, totalling the present market value to be at USD 23.2 billion.
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