SunBridge Global Ventures
7th Floor Knowledge Capital Tower C Grand Front Osaka, 3-1 Ofukacho, Osaka, 530-0011, Japan
Overview
The SunBridge Group is the premier partner for leading enterprise IT companies to enter the Japan market. Founded by Allen Miner, the founder of Oracle Japan, SunBridge has successfully partnered with Salesforce.com, Concur, SilkRoad and many others to build their Japan operations. SunBridge invests directly into startups and through its affiliates SunBridge Global Ventures (seed investor/accelerator in Japan), and SunBridge Partners (early-stage VC in US). They support promising entrepreneurs who challenge to develop business globally in IT by providing them seed capital and vital know-how which they cultivated in the investment experiences of the past ten years. SunBridge Global Ventures is a Global Seed Accelerator established in January 2012 as part of the SunBridge Group headquartered in Tokyo.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Finance
- Financial Services
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Material World
Participated · Seed · Dec 2012
Material Wrld combines a community-based photo-sharing site with e-commerce for high-end and contemporary fashion brands, letting users create photo “closets” of favorite items and designers. The product emphasizes discovery and social browsing alongside resale commerce, and recently added search by category and brand as it moves further into commerce. The service has been in beta since August and plans a public platform and mobile app launch next year, with international seller functionality to follow. Today the company reports over 50,000 visitors (35,000 uniques), nearly 8,000 registered users, tripled closets since August, and an average of 10 items uploaded per user; a little over half of listed items are not yet for sale. Early trials captured 6,000 emails, sold more than one-third of items listed in the first trial, and found roughly 20% of purchases in a later trial came from non-U.S. customers. Founders Rie Yano and Jie Zheng—who met in grad school at Harvard—intend to use the new funding to bring product and creative roles in-house and scale toward the public launch.
Team
No current team members are available.