Dentsu Ventures

Dentsu Ventures is the corporate venture capital fund of Dentsu Group, established in 2015 and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The fund focuses on making investments in seed, early, mid, and later-stage companies, primarily within the marketing and communication sectors, as well as the media and software industries. Dentsu Ventures targets opportunities across the United States, Europe, and Asia, aiming to support innovative businesses that align with its strategic interests.

Yuka Okada

Associate

Kotaro Sasamoto

Managing Partner and Co-Founder

27 past transactions

Pretia Technologies

Venture Round in 2022
Pretia Technologies is an AR startup that specializes in designing, developing, and providing internet services and applications.

Cowche

Series B in 2022
KAUCHE is a share-buying app that enables users to enjoy low-cost shopping by group-buying with share-buying companions such as friends and family. They provide services for online and mail-order retail shops. KAUCHE is committed in creating an exciting shopping experience for both customers and partners who want to sell products.

Alp

Series A in 2020
Alp provides a sales and billing management SaaS called Scalebase for recurring revenue businesses such as subscription businesses and SaaS businesses. By centrally managing business operations such as pricing design, product management, customer management, contract management, billing management, index analysis, advance payment management, journal entry creation, and so on, it is possible to reduce workload, increase freedom, and achieve revenue growth in the recurring revenue business.

Clear Labs

Series B in 2018
Clear Labs offers next-generation sequencing and data analytics for infectious disease surveillance and food safety testing. The company's platforms, Clear Dx™ and Clear Safety™, enable rapid identification of pathogens and support public health initiatives. The company focuses on delivering actionable insights to enhance safety and operational efficiency in various sectors.

Hoodline

Series A in 2018
Hoodline, Inc. is a media technology company based in San Francisco, California, that operates an online portal focused on hyperlocal news discovery across 40 cities in the United States. Founded in 2014, Hoodline leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to transform raw data into thousands of automated local stories and videos each month. The platform, known as Atlas, analyzes vast amounts of unstructured data to identify and validate significant local signals, while also aggregating content from numerous partner publications to enhance its offerings. Hoodline's innovative technology allows for precise location tagging and contextualization of news stories, facilitating a tailored user experience. The company collaborates with various partners, including major media outlets and tech companies, to integrate its content recommendations into their platforms. Hoodline operates as a subsidiary of SFist and is supported by prominent investors, including Greylock and Disney.

Shuttl

Series B in 2018
Shuttl exists to take the pain away from the daily commute. Currently, the company provides an app-based office shuttle service to make daily commute safe, reliable, affordable and dignified for everyone. The future of mass transit, according to us, will be shared, eco-friendly, tech-enabled commute. Shuttl is the future of public transport. It's a mobile-based minibus service aimed at making your daily commute more convenient. Their vehicles are air-conditioned and operate with high frequency on fixed routes freeing you from the hassles of existing public transport options at a very economical price point.

Cue

Series B in 2018
Cue helps users track their health at the molecular level, revealing the interplay of activity, food, and sleep. Consumers can track five key health and lifestyle indicators: inflammation, vitamin D, fertility, influenza, and testosterone in just minutes, at home. The Cue sends the data via Bluetooth 4.0 to the user's smartphone, where the free Cue app reveals the interplay of activity, food, and sleep shaping the user at a molecular level.

Arraiy

Series A in 2018
Headquartered in Palo Alto, Arraiy is building the premier AI-driven production platform for the motion picture and television industry. Arraiy is collaborating with major studios, industry veterans, and award-winning artists to re-invent the filmmaking process with machine learning at its foundation. With its products, Arraiy seeks to enhance the creative freedom of storytellers and unlock the next generation of visual storytelling.

Cheddar

Series D in 2018
Cheddar is the post-cable news, media, and entertainment company. Cheddar broadcasts live on SlingTV, Hulu Live, YouTube TV, Philo, Twitter, Facebook Watch, Pluto, Xumo and more. Watched live by more than 6.5M people each month, Cheddar also garners hundreds of millions of organic video views monthly across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social & distributed video platforms. Cheddar currently broadcasts two live video news networks: Cheddar, a business news network covering the most innovative executives, founders, products, and technologies transforming our lives and economy; and Cheddar Big News, a fast-paced, young, non-partisan general news and headline news network. The company broadcasts from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, its street-level studio in the glass corner of the Sprint Store in the Flatiron Building, WeWork in Los Angeles, and the White House. Cheddar was founded by Jon Steinberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of BuzzFeed from 2010 to 2014.

LiveLike

Series B in 2018
LiveLike develops an audience engagement platform that transforms digital users into engaged fans through customized interactive experiences. Its platform allows broadcasters to transform streaming into fan-driven interactive experiences. LiveLike’s audience engagement platform and gamification engine help sports organizations and media companies to enhance the fan experience, increase the time spent interacting with their content, and unlock the power of first-party data.

FOLIO

Venture Round in 2018
Folio offers AI-driven and automated investment services and a platform for financial institutions to manage discretionary investments.

Nimble Collective

Series A in 2018
Nimble Collective is a cloud animation platform that revolutionizes the way animation is created. Its animation platform through its nimble virtual studio builds a complete eco-system and helps creators to remove the barriers and can be used from any machine with a browser and an internet connection, enabling artists, brands, and businesses to create animated content faster and with significantly less overhead. The company was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Clue

Series A in 2017
CLUE, Inc. is a technology startup that develops and offers drone-based operating systems, platforms, cloud services, and smartphone apps. CLUE, Inc. was founded in 2014 and is based in Tokyo, Japan.

Loom.ai

Seed Round in 2017
Loom.ai is enabling a new era of virtual communication through the creation, animation and sharing of personalized, 3D avatars. Based in San Francisco, and an alumni of the Y Combinator Fellowship, the Academy Award-winning team has created a best-in-class solution powered by deep learning, computer vision and visual effects. In just seconds, Loom.ai can take a single photograph and transform it into a fully representative, 3D avatar as personalized as the individual by recognizing the many nuances that make each face unique. Animatable and expressive in real-time, these avatars can be used to power current and future applications in mobile messaging, entertainment, AR/VR, e-commerce, video conferencing, broadcasting and more. For more information, visit www.loom.ai Loom.ai has received funding from DHVC, Dentsu Ventures, Zach Coelius’ AngelList syndicate, GREE VR Capital, Presence Capital and Anorak Ventures.

Twist Bioscience

Venture Round in 2017
Twist Bioscience is a synthetic DNA production for specialty chemical compounds and drug development. At Twist Bioscience Corporation, they work in the service of customers who are changing the world for the better. In fields such as health care, agriculture, industrial chemicals, and data storage, by using our synthetic DNA tools, their customers are developing ways to better lives and improve the sustainability of the planet. They believe that the faster their customers succeed, the better for all of them, and Twist Bioscience is uniquely positioned to help accelerate their efforts. Their innovative silicon-based DNA Synthesis Platform provides precision at a scale that we believe is otherwise unavailable to their customers. their platform technologies overcome inefficiencies and enable cost-effective, rapid, precise, high-throughput synthesis and sequencing, providing both the quality and quantity of the tools they need to rapidly realize the opportunity ahead. Twist Bioscience was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Agile Media Network

Venture Round in 2017
Agile Media Network is a Tokyo-based advertising network and blog marketing company for blogs and social media. Much like Federated Media in the US, Agile Media Network, is well known for working with many top blogs, i.e. Engadget Japanese. The company, one of the biggest of its kind in Japan, provides a number of solutions in the advertising and planning fields for its clients. For example, Agile Media Network handles and organizes banner ad sales, large-scale blogger meetings, web industry events or campaign blogs. In August 2009, the company organized WISH 2009, a web industry event in Tokyo at which startups were given the chance to demonstrate their services onstage to an audience of over 400 people.

Two Bit Circus

Series B in 2017
Based in Los Angeles, Two Bit Circus is a community of entertainment and engineering enthusiasts who combine a love of technology with [mad] invention in pursuit of the future of fun. The company is opening the world’s first chain of micro-amusement parks. These one-acre entertainment complexes fuse the latest interactive technology with the wonder and spectacle of classic circus and carnival. The parks are a platform to showcase best-in-class interactive entertainment from all over the world, and are filled with unexpected social experiences that bring people together elbow-to-elbow to play, eat, drink, and generally experience life at highest resolution. Architected for maximum social impact, Two Bit Circus supports a parallel 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Two Bit Circus Foundation. Its mission is to cultivate the next generation of inventors, advance environmental stewardship, and spur community engagement by providing schools and youth of all means with access to hands-on STEAM learning, modern maker tools, and upcycled materials. For more information, visit www.twobitcircus.com or follow @TwoBitCircus and #TwoBitCircus.

MacroFab

Funding Round in 2017
MacroFab builds millions of custom-manufactured PCBA products every year through its North American factory lines. The company's easy-to-use platform reduces upfront costs and complexity while making it easier for companies of any size and at any stage of product development to bring products to market quickly and efficiently. By enhancing transparency and traceability, our technology platform helps teams maintain resiliency in the face of rapidly changing conditions by integrating design data, getting early risk feedback, and managing production around fast-changing conditions.

Survios

Series B in 2016
Survios is a virtual reality company that creates groundbreaking interactive content powered by cutting edge immersive technology. It is composed of a team of dreamers, makers, artists, thinkers, and gamers. It's focus is all about engaging games., immersive tech and unparalleled presence. Nathan Burba, James Iliff and Alexander Silkin launched Project Holodeck as an interdisciplinary effort at the University of Southern California’s Games program. From Project Holodeck they founded Survios, and continue to focus on virtual reality gaming and immersive technology.

LiveLike

Series A in 2016
LiveLike develops an audience engagement platform that transforms digital users into engaged fans through customized interactive experiences. Its platform allows broadcasters to transform streaming into fan-driven interactive experiences. LiveLike’s audience engagement platform and gamification engine help sports organizations and media companies to enhance the fan experience, increase the time spent interacting with their content, and unlock the power of first-party data.

Victorious

Series B in 2016
Victorious empowers creators to distribute all of their multimedia content in their own apps, interact more deeply and directly with their fan communities, and unlock new revenue streams. The company was founded in 2013 and is based in Santa Monica, California.

Exo

Series A in 2016
Exo is a producer and provider of protein bars made from cricket flour. Its protein bars are a combination of cricket flour with organic ingredients such as raw cacao, dates, almond butter, and coconut to create a bar that is high in protein, low in sugar, nutritionally dense, and packed with omega 3 fatty acids, iron, and calcium that enable users to get sports bar that is free of sugar, gluten, grains, dairy, soy, and artificial preservatives. It was founded in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Cue

Venture Round in 2015
Cue helps users track their health at the molecular level, revealing the interplay of activity, food, and sleep. Consumers can track five key health and lifestyle indicators: inflammation, vitamin D, fertility, influenza, and testosterone in just minutes, at home. The Cue sends the data via Bluetooth 4.0 to the user's smartphone, where the free Cue app reveals the interplay of activity, food, and sleep shaping the user at a molecular level.

Data Vehicle

Seed Round in 2015
Data Vehicle is engaged in IT marketing research and consulting businesses. It also involves the planning, production, maintenance, and operation of various media, such as content using the internet and communication lines, and digital content, including the acquisition, analysis, and analysis of big data.

Sensai Corporation

Venture Round in 2015
Sensai is a Content Analytics platform for Sales, Operations, and Finance teams. Analysts use Sensai to find and trend emerging concepts within enterprise repositories and from public and private feeds. Sensai features novel methods of clustering and tuning results so that users can quickly test theories, quantify and iterate on patterns in the data.

Nextbit Systems

Venture Round in 2015
Nextbit Systems primarily operates as a mobile technology company.

Jibo

Series A in 2015
Founded in 2012, Jibo is widely known for creating the eponymous robot, Jibo: the first social robot for the home. Jibo is built to interact and communicate with the people around him, and he uses advanced Natural Language Understanding (NLU) along with speech and facial recognition to forge relationships with his family. Jibo, Inc. officially launched Jibo to the public in 2017 after nearly three years of intensive development and optimization. The company is privately held and headquartered in Boston.
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