Japan-based digital marketing platform provider From Scratch raised ¥10bn ($93.9m) yesterday in a series D round featuring Rakuten Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of e-commerce firm Rakuten.
Private equity firm KKR led the round through its KKR Asian Fund III, and Japan Post Investment, a fund jointly run by financial services firm Japan Post Bank and life insurer Japan Post, also took part, as did consulting firm Link and Motivation.
Brokerage Daiwa Securities Group, asset manager Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment and investment bank Goldman Sachs participated through Daiwa Corporate Investment, Japan Co-Invest II and GS Growth Investment respectively. The investors were filled out by DNX Ventures and Global Brain, the latter through its SFV GB vehicle.
Founded in 2010, From Scratch has developed an online marketing platform called B→Dash, which allows enterprise customers to combine and manage different marketing activities in a single place.
From Scratch will utilise the series D proceeds to expand its business in the Asia-Pacific region, in addition to strengthening recruitment and launching Data Palette, a data integration technology it is developing.
The company has accumulated approximately $137m in funding altogether, it said. The series D round came after investors including Rakuten Ventures and public-private partnership Innovation Network Corporation of Japan provided $28.4m in a mid-2017 series C round.
Dentsu Digital Holdings, a subsidiary of digital marketing firm Dentsu, had joined Global Brain and Nippon Venture Capital to invest $8.3m in November 2015. From Scratch had collected $2.5m from Itochu Technology Ventures, part of trading group Itochu, and DNX (then known as Draper Nexus Venture Partners) six months earlier.
