CyberAgent Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of Japan-based internet group CyberAgent, has invested an undisclosed amount in Wondershake, a local social media service start-up.
CyberAgent Ventures primarily focuses on investment into early-stage start-ups having set up its CA Startups Internet Fund I in August. Last month, the fund invested in Zawatt, while in August CyberAgent backed Korea-based Kakao, a social and messaging group founded by Brian Kim, the ex-founder and chief executive of media group NHN (which has set up a corporate venturing unit NHN Investment).
Alongside CyberAgent in the Wondershake deal was Sunbridge, a Japan and US-based technology incubator founded by database provider Oracle Japan’s former president, Allen Miner.
Wondershake won the grand prix at news provider TechCrunch Japan’s start-up pitch event in April, where Miner was chairman.
At the same time in April, Miner backed Japan-based cloud service provider Midokura, which raised Y113m in its seed round from NTT Investment Partners, the corporate venturing unit of Japan’s largest phone operator, datacentre operator Bit-Isle, software vendor 1st Holdings and angel investors.
Midokura has already started cooperating with NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories in the OpenStack community.
Midokura was founded by in January last year by Tatsuya Kato, a serial entrepreneur and a former executive officer of CSK holdings, Dan Mihai Dumitriu, a former Researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and Kiyoshi Nishikawa, a renowned IT incubator at NGI Group.