BizReach secures $33 million to develop hiring management platform

Tokyo-based BizReach, the Japanese company providing an online talent search platform under the same name, announced today that it has fundraised about 3.73 billion yen (about $32.9 million) in the second funding round. This round was led by YJ Capital, the investment arm of Yahoo Japan, investing 1.6 billion yen ($14 million), with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment, Dentsu Digital Holdings,Gree, Rakuten, Link and Motivation, EFU Investment Limited, East Ventures, and IMJ Investment Partners.

The funds will be used to further develop their employment search engines and job listing services including StanBy which launch last year. Coinciding with this announcement, the company unveiled that they plan to launch a cloud-based hiring management platform called HRMOS (pronounced ‘harmos’) in May in addition to continuing operating the aforementioned services as well as an applicant tracking system (ATS) called StanBy Company.

BizReach was launched back in April of 2009 by Soichiro Swimmy Minami, one of the founders of the Rakuten Eagles, an expansion baseball club in the Japanese professional league. The latest round follows the company’s first funding round having raised 200 million yen from Japanese investment firm Jafco in March of 2010. Minami founded member-only premium outlet e-commerce site Luxa as a business of BizReach in August 2010 but made it spun off in October 2010 because BizReach shifted its focus to a job hunting and talent search business. Since Japan’s leading telco KDDI took a majority stake in Luxa in April 2015, it is told that Minami has put much profit from the sales of the stocks into the BizReach business.

(This is the abridged version from our original article in Japanese. Translated by Masaru Ikeda.)

This post first appeared on The Bridge.