Investment banking firm Goldman Sachs will invest ¥2bn ($17.6m) in Sansan, a Japan-based business card management platform developer backed by corporates Salesforce, GMO, Nikkei, Recruit, CyberAgent and Nippon Life, Nikkei has reported.
Sansan has created an app called Eight that allows users to store all their business contacts information in a single place. The company, which has registered 1.8 million users in Japan, intends to now expand to markets such as India, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations.
The deal will form part of a Japanese investment drive by Goldman Sachs that will involve it investing more than $870m of capital, from its own reserves and those of external investors, in the next year or two, Goldman Sachs Japan president Masanori Mochida told Nikkei.
The investment will boost Sansan’s total funding to almost $94m. Enterprise software producer Salesforce, DCM Ventures and Future Creation Fund, which is backed by carmaker Toyota and financial services firm Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, provided it with $38m in August 2017.
Internet company CyberAgent and human resources provider Recruit supplied $500,000 in seed capital for the company in 2009, before it raised $5m from internet company GMO and Nissay Capital, the corporate venturing subsidiary of insurance group Nippon Life.
Sansan raised $14m in a 2014 series B round that included GMO’s investment arm, GMO Venture Partners, media group Nikkei’s Nikkei Digital Media unit, Energy & Environment Investment and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan.
Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venture capital vehicle for Salesforce, subsequently joined Nissay Capital for Sansan’s $16.9m series C round in January 2016.