Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

Founded in April 2019, Tokyo-based Rayout positions itself as a “Creative PMO,” embedding project managers who understand both business strategy and creative execution inside client organizations. Its core consulting offering covers branding, PR, production, and progress management, eliminating the multilayer subcontracting structures that often inflate project management costs. Complementing the service arm, the company launched CheckBack in 2023, a cloud platform that lets teams review, share, and approve videos, web assets, graphics, and documents; more than 5,000 teams have already adopted the tool. To date Rayout has supported over 500 companies across 2,300 projects, underscoring strong market traction. The firm plans to expand CheckBack’s “progress AI” features—such as automated review workflows, guideline enforcement, and feedback reuse—and to grow its PMO workforce. Including the latest round, it has raised approximately ¥184 million in equity financing. Raised capital will be directed toward product development, marketing, and headcount expansion aimed at accelerating CheckBack’s growth.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2025

WAKU is an agri-bio venture developing glutathione-based biostimulants that enhance plant stress tolerance, photosynthetic activity, root development, and crop establishment. Its mission is to “protect human food with glutathione,” and it has progressed from founding in 2022 to field trials with over 70 producers nationwide, including a large leek producer in Fukaya City. The company plans to use its technology first in agriculture and later explore applications in forestry, algae cultivation, and cosmetics. Near-term commercial plans include expanding a domestic sales organization and preparing for overseas deployment, particularly in the EU where biostimulant adoption is growing. Financially, WAKU completed a pre-Series A fundraising to support R&D on new glutathione products and go-to-market activities.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2024

Swell operates itowa, a digital platform that creates obituary pages and enables people to send online condolence messages (弔電), monetary offerings (香典), flowers and other funeral items. The service notifies bereaved families via LINE, generates a family-only page per funeral, and lets funeral homes manage guest lists and reduce administrative burden. Funeral homes pay no introduction fee and itowa takes a commission on online sales; the platform has been used in over 700 funerals and has delivered notices to more than 18,000 people. CEO Mitsuru Sakamoto has 15 years of funeral-industry experience, which guided the product design and go-to-market approach. Swell aims to grow adoption among funeral homes, expand product functionality, and hire support staff to increase online participation at funerals. The company projects ambitious market targets, including 350,000 annual uses and a ¥200 billion annual transaction market by 2028. Swell was founded in April 2020 and is based in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture.

Participated · Convertible Note · Mar 2020

On, formerly known as GameOn Technology, is a San Francisco, CA–based provider of an AI chat platform designed for enterprise use. Its platform empowers generative AI experiences that enable brands to create new and sustainable revenue streams and connect with customers and fans. The company lists partners including Valentino, Armani, the New York Yankees, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Philadelphia 76ers. On is led by Alex Beckman, Kalin Stanojev, and Nate Simmons and serves luxury lifestyle brands and sports teams worldwide. It raised $25M in the reported round, bringing total capital raised to $80M. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and broaden its business reach. GameOn Technology operates an omnichannel conversational chat platform that powers personalized, real-time experiences for brands and sports teams, delivering live scores, highlights, videos, commerce and customer service. The platform is used by major teams and properties across the NBA, NFL, NHL, PGA Tour, FIFA and ATP, and by clients such as Arsenal F.C., the Milwaukee Bucks and the Las Vegas Raiders. GameOn reports conversational click-through rates over 50% (up to 65% on commerce-related content) and claims 10x the user engagement compared with traditional paid search. The company leverages intelligent chat to deepen fan profiles across channels and to create sustainable revenue channels for brands. GameOn plans to deepen its footprint in sports and expand into diversified verticals like retail while scaling technical, business development and marketing efforts. GameOn Technology is a San Francisco–based conversational application platform that provides a proprietary end-to-end development and integration platform called ChatOS™ for messaging and voice services. The platform connects directly to brands’ CMS, data sources and API feeds to deploy rich content—scores, live updates, highlights, gifs and videos—across popular chat and voice applications. GameOn’s solution enables brands to engage fans in natural conversation and deliver dynamic content where fans are. The company counts partners such as the NBA, NHL, PGA, Arsenal F.C., Sky Sports and TIME Inc. as customers. Led by founder and CEO Alex Beckman, GameOn plans to use new capital to accelerate ChatOS development, expand into new content verticals, and increase sales efforts. The company has raised $18.5M in total capital to date, including the most recent financing. GameOn is a free iOS and Android social sports app that lets fans join team-specific “huddles” which automatically surface real-time news, scores, and highlights and allow friends to interact during games. The app supports in-stadium video sharing, in-house high-quality sticker packs tied to athletes, and plans to let athletes host public huddles for live interaction and anecdotes. Prominent athletes — including Lawyer Milloy, Sydney Leroux, Joel Embiid, Cobi Jones, T.J. Ward and Dwayne Bravo — have signed on to contribute exclusive content. The San Francisco company was founded last year and has eight employees. GameOn has recorded more than 50,000 downloads during a year of public beta testing. The startup raised seed funding to further develop the platform and expand the team.

Participated · Series A · Apr 2018

East Meet East is a New York–based matchmaking service focused on connecting Asian people in the U.S. Its core U.S. product matches Asian men and women, with men paying and women using the service for free. The company is expanding into Southeast Asia and is testing a Philippines service with plans to potentially enter Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia and open local offices. The Southeast Asia offshoot, called West East Dating, is aimed at matching people of all races rather than only Asians. East Meet East is also working to enable smarter matching via an AI engine developed in partnership with DG Lab Fund; the company will provide anonymized data to help train the system. Financially, the startup raised a $4M Series A and previously raised $1M in November 2016. East Meet East operates a matchmaking-focused dating service for Asians in the U.S., available on the web and iOS with an Android app planned for early 2017. The product prioritizes romance over casual hookups and matches users via shared likes, activities and interests; the company is also developing artificial intelligence to improve match relevance. It is active in six U.S. cities and has grown its total user base three-fold over the past year. The service is free for women while men are charged $30 per month. The company has a team of 10 staff and uses influencer partnerships (e.g., Fung Brothers, David So, Linda Dong, ISATV) as a key acquisition channel. Management plans U.S. expansion over the next nine months followed by moves into Canada, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong and broader Asia. EastMeetEast is a NYC-based online dating service connecting Asians who want to date within their cultural background in the U.S. The service is free and allows singles to browse and communicate with one another. It is led by CEO and founder Mariko Tokioka, an Oxford MBA and co-founder of Quipper. The company has released its first iPhone app. EastMeetEast raised $500K in seed funding from investors including DeNA and Eureka Ventures. The company intends to use the funds to expand beyond NYC, targeting Asian-centric cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.