The Venture Codex

Led · Series A · Apr 2022

Beatrust is a Tokyo-based provider of a collaboration platform led by CEO Kunio Hara. Its first product, Beatrust People, enables users to search and communicate by disclosing and sharing skills, experience and past career history. The second product, Beatrust Ask, is an internal knowledge platform that stimulates communication and collaboration among users. Customers include AGC Inc., LION Corporation, SUMITOMO CORPORATION, Konica Minolta Inc., KDDI CORPORATION and TB Next Communications, and the company serves firms across finance, real estate, auto-manufacturing, IT and advertising. Beatrust raised a $6.3M Series A to strengthen product and sales structures, accelerate functional development and advance infrastructure and security for enterprise customers. The company plans to grow the team to research overseas markets and strengthen its organizational structure. BeaTrust offers an enterprise collaboration platform that lets employees at large companies discover colleagues in different departments based on skills and interests and provides tools to work together on projects. Its initial feature set includes employee profiles listing skills and experience, with forthcoming modules to visualize team organization and enable collaboration on various project types including software development. The product is currently in closed beta, being tested with three late-stage startups of roughly 100–200 employees each. The founders say the platform is intended as a complement to Slack, Microsoft Teams and other communication tools, focusing on cross-department discovery rather than team chat. BeaTrust aims to reshape corporate culture at large Japanese companies by reducing silos and top-down communication, then expand into European and Asian markets where remote work is persisting. Financially, the company recently closed a seed round of JPY 300 million (about USD $2.83 million) to support product development and growth.