Tokyo-based Hacobu, a business-to-business logistics optimization startup, has announced that it has secured 940 million yen (about $8.7 million US) in its latest round of funding. Participating investors are JIC Venture Growth Investments (JIC VGI), NN Corporate Capital (Investment arm of Nomura Real Estate Holdings), Toyota Tsusho (TSE:8015), Logistics Innovation Fund (Spiral (TSE:8015), Logistics Innovation Fund (a sector-focused fund managed by Spiral Capital and ledby Seino Holdings as an anchor limited partner), SMBC Venture Capital, Daiwa House Group’s Daiwa Logitech, and Mitsui Fudosan (TSE:8801).
For the startup, this round follows 160 million yen funding in November of 2016, 140 million yen funding in November of 2017, and 400 million yen funding in April of 2019. Among the investors participating in the latest round round, Daiwa Logitech and Mitsui Fudosan followed their previous investments made in September of 2017 and September of 2019 respectively. The latest rounding brought the company’s funding sum to date up to at least 1.64 billion yen ($15.2 million).
Hacobu was founded in May 2016 by CEO Taro Sasaki who had been previously working as a consultant on a project for Morinaga Milk where he faced with the challenge of how to improve the logistics efficiency of the milk company’s 10 logistics subsidiaries in Japan, which led to developing a shared logistics platform called Movo.
They offer the platform to more than 500 companies including manufacturers, retailers, and logistics providers all across Japan. Thanks to the cloud and hardware such as the IoT devices managing moving vehicles, the company solves problems like vehicle dispatch (as an integrated logistics management solution, solves the problem of the difficulty of finding trucks to dispatch), operation management (solves the problem of not knowing location information of the trucks), and berth management (solves the problem of using trucks efficiently because of waiting time).
The startup will use the funds to hire talents for the development and sales of the application, strengthen logistics big data analysis infrastructure, and launch and operate big data governance system. They expect to accelerate their progress toward solving social issues such as long working hours at logistics sites, carbon emissions, inventory disposal, and food waste through the optimization of logistics and supply chains.
