Nissei Capital, the corporate venturing unit of Nippon Life Insurance Company, has taken part in a Y500m ($5m) series B round in Sansan, a local business card and social media application developer.
The latest fundraising by the company follows a 2009 deal that was worth Y50m ($0.5m) from games developer CyberAgent, Recruit Incubation Partners, and GMO Venture Partners, the corporate venturing unit of the eponymous internet company that raised a Y1bn second fund late last year.
Sansan is known for providing the Eight app, a combined solution for business card scanning, data entry, and contact management. By linking your Eight account with your social media providers, such as Facebook, Google Plus, and Mixi, your contacts will be automatically imported and connected.
The new contacts or business cards will then appear on your Eight page. Another service includes your business cards for free or by yourself through the company’s smart phone app.
The funding raised will be used towards developing the application for global users and expects to launch a revised app later this month.
According to a Cnet Japan news report, the management is not considering charging for their services until the user base reaches ten million. The current number of users is at about 200,000.
The report also noted that Sansan will take the business model to a global scale in the near future, hiring crowdsourcing workers for card scanning and data entry, which will make data entry possible regardless of language barriers, according to a company press release and interviews with local news sources.