Lazuli Inc. raises ¥500 million in Series A funding from Carbide Ventures and others
Press Release
Using AI technology, Lazuli Inc. (headquarters: Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Seigen Hagiwara; hereinafter Lazuli), which develops and provides the cloud product master Lazuli PDP (Product Data Platform), completed a third-party allotment capital increase in April 2022 in its Series A round, with Carbide Ventures (California, USA; General Partner and Manager: Dan Weirich) as the lead investor, and Coral Capital (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Founding Partner and CEO: James Riney; hereinafter Coral Capital) and Infomart Inc. (Minato-ku, Tokyo; President and Representative Director: Ken Nakajima; hereinafter Infomart) as the underwriters. The total amount raised in this round was 500 million yen, bringing Lazuli's cumulative funding to 560 million yen.
Purpose of the financing
With this funding, Lazuli will significantly strengthen its development structure by hiring engineers and machine learning engineers in Japan and overseas to further improve the functionality of Lazuli PDP, which the company develops and provides, and to develop new features such as APIs. This will make a strong contribution to customers' DX promotion across a wide range of sectors, including food and beverage, daily necessities, pharmaceuticals, durable consumer goods, books, music, video content, and fashion. In addition, toward realizing the company's mission to transform information distribution across the entire supply chain, it will continue to advance product development and deployment.
The challenges Lazuli is tackling
In recent years, the importance of data utilization in management, and the DX that lies beyond it, has been increasingly emphasized. By integrating and analyzing various types of data such as sales and member information, companies can carry out digital initiatives that create customer value, including AI utilization and e-commerce expansion. To do this, organizing master data, which forms the core of the data foundation, is indispensable. However, until now, companies have had only two choices: invest substantial human resources and solve the problem manually in a labor-intensive way, or give up. Because they could not overcome this challenge, we often see companies struggling to promote DX. By providing AI-based natural language processing and large-scale data handling technology as SaaS, Lazuli PDP solves this issue across a variety of sectors, including food and beverage, daily necessities, and pharmaceuticals, and accelerates companies' DX initiatives.
Recent business progress
Since its founding in 2020, Lazuli has helped customers build the data foundation needed to realize DX using Lazuli PDP. It has already been adopted by leading players in the industry, such as Asahi Soft Drinks and Cainz, where it has achieved a significant reduction in data entry work. It is also highly regarded as an indispensable presence in customers' DX promotion by enabling digital initiatives based on collected, organized, and expanded customer data. In September 2021, Lazuli won second place in the "SaaS RISING STAR CATAPULT Find the Next Unicorn!" category at the Industry Co-Creation Summit KYOTO 2021 held in Kyoto, drawing strong praise from investors and corporate executives alike and attracting attention for its growth potential. Lazuli has already conducted PoCs with many companies, including major pharmaceutical manufacturers, convenience stores, and e-commerce operators, and with this funding, it will accelerate PoCs and full-scale rollouts toward further business expansion.
Funding overview
Series A amount raised
500 million yen
Cumulative amount raised
560 million yen
New investors
・Carbide Ventures
・Infomart
Existing investors
・Coral Capital
・Individual investors
Comments from the investors
Carbide Ventures Partner Yusei Yoshikawa
For a company to succeed, people, things, and money need to come together at the right time, and that trinity brings in luck and leads to future growth. Among this "luck," the biggest factor that a startup cannot control is market timing. There are countless examples where the necessary component technologies are in place, but the market has not yet demanded them, or where demand is already visible but technology and product development cannot keep up.
Through more than 10 years of experience at Treasure Data, which I co-founded, I had become convinced that steady improvement in data quality is essential to the success of the various data projects carried out by enterprise companies. On the other hand, except for examples such as ad technology, the product market for supplying high-quality data in an industry-specific, specialized, and stable manner was still underdeveloped.
Lazuli is a company that will break through this situation. I see this as a rare opportunity to create a new product category in response to timely market needs. I look forward to continuing to support the growth of a company built by experienced, high-quality founding members.
Infomart President and Representative Director Ken Nakajima
As we have developed services that connect businesses, we have experienced many onboardings. From that experience, we believe there are two barriers to accelerating the spread of SaaS services: verifying the effects of implementation and minimizing implementation costs. In implementation effect verification, after accurately understanding the business flow of the company adopting the service, it is necessary to correctly reflect each company's master information in the system. In that process, we believe Lazuli's service, which supports the rapid organization of master information, is an excellent fit with our services. Going forward, we hope to support the further development of its services and that it will also help accelerate the expansion of our own services.
Coral Capital Founding Partner and CEO James Riney
As social transformation driven by digital transformation advances, many companies are beginning to realize that without a sophisticated solution for managing product data in an organized form, they cannot obtain the insights needed for optimal decision-making. We believed that Lazuli could build an excellent solution by establishing a unique position in this field, and we decided to invest as seed investors. And now, as follow-on investors, we are very pleased that they have made great progress and can welcome a powerful global lead investor specializing in this field.
Comment from Lazuli Representative Director Seigen Hagiwara
We are extremely pleased to have received expectations and support from various companies and investors in this Series A round. We would like to express our sincere gratitude.
This time, Carbide Ventures and Infomart Inc. invested as new investors. As a global VC, Carbide Ventures supports cross-border startup investment and growth. With a view to solving fundamental data challenges and expanding globally, it led this round as its first investment in Japan. In addition, Infomart, which is taking the lead in digitalizing the food service industry, supported us with the expectation that we would work together on innovative initiatives in B2B commerce by organizing master data across various industries, centered on product masters.
And Coral Capital, our existing investor that has consistently shown expectations and support since the seed round, followed on with its unwavering strong backing. We sincerely appreciate it.
We also sincerely thank the enterprise companies that, despite being still in the early stages, saw the future potential in Lazuli PDP, which is striving to bring about a revolution in product masters, and took the lead in using it and providing valuable feedback.
We want to continue refining the product and live up to everyone's expectations even more.
Using advanced engineering to address the global challenge of organizing product information and innovating information distribution, we will strengthen hiring for various engineering specialists and move forward with building a sophisticated product and the organization that will create it. There are many challenges to overcome in building an exceptional SaaS: massive data collection and the data infrastructure layer that manages it, the AI/ML layer that actively analyzes and organizes the obtained data, and the interface layer that provides and analyzes necessary information in real time for a variety of customers. However, with an active and visionary engineering team, we will evolve it into an overwhelming product.
About each investor
Carbide Ventures
A venture capital firm founded by the founders of Treasure Data Inc., which develops and provides SaaS "Treasure Data CDP" that supports customer understanding and customer experience optimization needed for corporate digital transformation. It invests mainly in SaaS companies that leverage next-generation core technologies (5G, AI, robotics, edge computing, etc.). Operating from two bases, Silicon Valley and Tokyo, it aims to bring products and technologies from Japan to the world and from the world to Japan, supporting global expansion. Its strength lies in a team composed of members who have access to and judgment of cutting-edge technology, business networking, and practical know-how as business operators.
Infomart
Operates the "BtoB Platform," which aims to connect companies and people around the world. As a "platformer" for B2B transactions, it promotes the shift from paper to electronic data and paperless operations for companies across various industries and business categories through Infomart's services. The number of companies using the service is approximately 700,000, and the annual distribution amount in FY2021 exceeded 18.5 trillion yen.
・Coral Capital
A venture capital firm targeting seed to early-stage companies, investing in top entrepreneurs across all industries, from fusion to SaaS. It manages about 30 billion yen and has invested in more than 80 startups so far, including SmartHR, Kakehashi, Holmes, Graffer, Logiless, Kaminashi, and Pocket Concierge (acquired by American Express).
What is Lazuli PDP (Product Data Platform)?
Lazuli PDP, developed and provided by Lazuli, is a platform that centrally manages product information scattered across multiple external databases and organizes and expands it into a form that makes the data easier to use. It uses AI to consolidate diverse product master data held by manufacturers, retailers, pharmaceutical companies, and others, and assigns meta tags and relationships based on efficacy and product characteristics. This information is stored in "NINJA DB" and provided to users as Lazuli PDP. As industry-specific PDPs, Lazuli provides Lazuli PDP for Pharma for the pharmaceutical industry, Lazuli PDP for F&B for the food and beverage industry, and Lazuli PDP for Retail for the retail industry.
https://corporate.lazuli.ninja/service
About Lazuli Inc.
Lazuli Inc. is a startup founded in July 2020. Leveraging advanced AI technology and the cloud, it is developing and providing SaaS that enables anyone involved in business to use product information from around the world as an AI product master. As products are manufactured, distributed, and sold, data related to those products is not smoothly synchronized between companies or even within companies. We see this as one of the major factors hindering DX. To solve this, Lazuli develops and provides the SaaS cloud product master "Lazuli PDP," which allows people involved in business to easily access product information.
https://corporate.lazuli.ninja/
We are looking for teammates who will transform information distribution
We uphold the following statements.
And we are looking for teammates who resonate with these and are willing to take on the challenge together.
・Purpose : Organize product information from around the world and democratize data
・Mission : Transform information distribution
・Value : Simple, Decision, Leadership, Kindness
The positions we are currently hiring for are as follows.
■Server-side Engineer
https://www.wantedly.com/projects/838367
■Machine Learning Engineer