Sansan provides a system that digitizes business cards, uploads them to the cloud, and organizes contacts so companies (rather than individual employees) can track interactions such as meetings, calls and notes. Its core product, also called Sansan, is used by about 7,000 corporations; the company also operates Eight, a LinkedIn-like service with roughly two million users globally and about 100,000 registered users in Southeast Asia since a soft launch in October 2017. Sansan has an office in Singapore and has already picked up about 100 clients in the region, largely by targeting Japanese firms there. The firm says it is hiring data scientists to add more intelligence to its services and plans to expand further into India, Europe and potentially the U.S. in the future. The company positions its products to boost networking and engagement rather than job-hunting use cases, and faces competition from established networks like LinkedIn and Facebook while SaaS adoption among SMEs in Southeast Asia remains nascent. Sansan provides cloud-based business card and contact management services to professionals and corporate customers. Founded in 2007 and based in Tokyo, it serves over 6,000 premium corporate users and more than 1.5 million registered users, including government and major corporate clients. The company operates a business-network service called Eight, launched in 2012, and has a Singapore subsidiary, Sansan Global PTE.LTD, established in October 2015. Sansan plans to introduce and market an English version of Eight to Asia in September 2017. The company intends to use recent funding to expand into new cities across Asia, including India, and to extend its market position through its business card management services. Sansan provides cloud software that stores and organizes information scanned from business cards using OCR combined with crowdsourced human transcription. The product creates a shared contacts database to help employees share connections and identify business leads, and the company recently launched its cloud service in Singapore. Sansan plans to use the new capital to add features to its mobile apps, win larger enterprise customers, and integrate with more CRM systems. The company intends to earmark $3 million of the Series C to expand in Singapore. Sansan currently claims about 4,000 corporate users. The company is led by founder and CEO Chika Terada and is based in Tokyo. Sansan is a Tokyo-based cloud contact-management service that automatically scans and transcribes business cards and uploads structured contact data to the cloud. Its software tracks contextual details such as who met the contact, where, when, and for what reason to make corporate contacts collaboratively usable. The product is positioned to increase sales-team productivity and enhance customer relationships through centralized contact intelligence. Sansan reports over 2,000 corporate customers in Japan. The company faces established competitors in the U.S. market but plans to differentiate via automatic card scanning and contextual tracking. Sansan plans to use new funding to expand into the U.S. this month and to grow in other international markets.

Total raised

$96M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Dec 2018