Japan-based enterprise and sales support software provider Smartcamp has been bought by cloud accounting platform developer Money Forward for $18.3m in a deal enabling corporates KDDI, Mitsubishi UFJ, Itochu and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation to exit, according to The Bridge.
Founded in 2014, Smartcamp runs an online marketplace called Boxil which hosts a range of cloud-hosted enterprise software applications intended to enhance productivity.
The company has also built a cloud-hosted software tool dubbed Biscuit for customer relationship management and the Bales software platform for sales teams targeting customers over remote channels such as e-mail and web conferencing.
Money Forward expects the deal to help extend its client base and the corporate will leverage Smartcamp’s expertise to drive customer acquisition campaigns for its products.
Telecommunications firm KDDI equipped Smartcamp with an unspecified sum in May 2019 through its KDDI Open Innovation Fund partnership with venture capital firm Global Brain, adding to $2.7m of series B capital raised by Smartcamp two years previously.
The series B funding came from diversified trading firm Itochu, financial services firms Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and unnamed existing investors, with the corporates investing through their respective subsidiaries – Itochu Technology Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and SMBC Venture Capital.
Smartcamp had already raised $170,000 in 2015 from Solaced Startups Investment.