Japan's version of LinkedIn gets $33 million in new funding

Japanese recruiting startup BizReach announced a Series A round of funding from 10 companies totaling $32.8 million on March 29. The investors in the round are YJ Capital, Japan Co-Invest Fund, Salesforce Ventures, Dentsu Digital Holdings, Gree, Rakuten, Link and Motivation, EFU Investment Limited, IMJ Investment Partners Japan Fund 1, and East Ventures (Disclosure: Tech in Asia is also backed by East Ventures).

The lead investor for the round was Yahoo! Japan’s investment arm YJ Capital, which invested $13.9 million, the largest investment amount to date for the fund. It was also the first investment from IMJ’s new fund focusing on Japan.

This round makes BizReach one of the most funded startups in Japan.

This round makes BizReach one of the most funded startups in Japan.

BizReach has been called the LinkedIn of Japan and gone against the traditional recruiting business model by allowing companies to post jobs and connect with professionals in its database for free. Paid subscriptions are also available for job seekers as well as additional premium options for corporations.

BizReach has four main services. The original service is for high-class recruitment and aimed at job seekers looking for salaries of over $75,000. There are also separate services targeting women and young professionals in their twenties. Stanby, a job search engine released by BizReach in 2015, currently lists over four million jobs. BizReach also has a job site RegionUP aimed at professionals in Southeast Asia.

Founder and CEO Soichiro “Swimmy” Minami loves challenges and was part of the founding team of a professional baseball club in Japan. He started BizReach after having difficulty finding new projects to work on through the traditional recruiting process in Japan.

Although BizReach has been profitable through recruiting advertisements since 2014, Swimmy is again looking for his next challenge. He hopes to use the funds he just raised to grow Stanby and use its applicant tracking system as the base for a new cloud recruiting system called HRMOS set to open in May 2016.

Although applicant tracking systems are common in the U.S. — with sites like Workable, Greenhouse, and Lever — and search engine-like job posting sites such as Monster.com have been around since 1999, BizReach still provides a novel service in Japan.

BizReach wants to bring more analytical capabilities to recruitment. Swimmy hopes to eventually track employees over their lifetime. This means a company could manage applicants before hiring, keep track of back office tasks like pensions, and even track employee performance at a single location.