Japan-based business card management platform Sansan received ¥3bn ($26.4m) yesterday in a series E round co-led by Japan Post Capital, the corporate venturing division of courier and logistics firm Japan Post.
Japan Post co-led the round with SBI Investment, a corporate venturing vehicle for financial services firm SBI Group, as well as asset management firm T. Rowe Price and venture capital firm DCM Ventures.
Sansan operates a cloud-based contact management platform that uses optical character recognition technology to extract details from business cards, store them digitally and uncover actionable insights such as job changes.
The company has also built a business-to-consumer app, Eight, that offers a professional social network to users in Japan, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. The series E funding will drive Sansan’s business growth.
Sansan has raised some $120m to date. Investment bank Goldman Sachs injected $17.6m in November 2017. Enterprise software producer Salesforce, DCM and Future Creation Fund, backed by carmaker Toyota, had supplied $38m three months before.
Internet company CyberAgent and human resources firm Recruit contributed to the company’s $500,000 seed round in 2009, before Sansan collected $5m from internet company GMO and Nissay Capital, the corporate venturing arm of insurance provider Nippon Life, in 2013.
GMO Venture Partners, the investment division of GMO, backed a $14m series B round for Sansan in 2014 that included media group Nikkei’s Digital Media unit, Energy & Environment Investment and public-private partnership Innovation Network Corporation of Japan.
Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of Salesforce, then joined Nissay Capital for the company’s $16.9m series C round in 2016.
