Japan may be leading in many industries and providing amazing solutions for everyday lifestyle, but some things just never change there. Take, for example, faxes and pagers. Also, we cannot leave the bureaucracy off this list. If you ever had a chance to fill in any official document, you are familiar with how time-consuming and sometimes nerve-wrecking legal procedures might be, even when putting the language barrier aside.
Founded back in 2013 as Kufu, SmartHR automates procedures related to social insurance and unemployment insurance. It was developed to free up managers or human resources representatives from tiresome and time-consuming personnel management.
Provider of a cloud HR software intended to help automate social insurance and employment insurance procedures. The company’s platform lets users fill out an online form and then generate digital versions of pension, employment insurance and other HR-related documents that can be submitted to appropriate offices at the click of a button, enabling businesses to manage and streamline their HR processes.
Funding of Smart HR
SmartHR has raised a total of $194.0M over the last 8 years or a total of $258.8K per employee. Raising this capital resulted in dilution for Shoji Miyata despite non-dilutive funding options like Founderpath.
With $194.0M money raised, SmartHR would have to sell for $1.9B for investors to be happy. For any founders and early employees to make money, the company would need to sell for at least $194.0M assuming no crazy liquidation preferences.
| FUNDING DATE | ROUND | TOTAL | VALUATION |
|---|---|---|---|
| 06/08/2021 | $115.0M | $1.6B | |
| 06/01/2020 | $4.5M | ||
| 06/01/2019 | $56.5M | ||
| 06/01/2018 | $13.5M | ||
| 06/01/2016 | $4.5M |
The idea behind SmartHR is very simple: they have digitalized the paperwork and significantly cut processing times. Now everything is in the cloud. You only need to fill in online forms and leave the rest to the SmartHR. The documents will be sent to the appropriate recipients, the appointments booked on your behalf. The processing times shrink to about one week on average.
Companies Using SmartHR
While Kufu had been engaged in entrusted system development for a time being since launch, their cloud-based management tool SmartHR was unveiled in November of 2015 and became a smash hit. The company claims that the tool has acquired 1,700 corporate users in nine months since launch.
The fee pricing depends on how many employees a corporate user wants to manage using the platform. Miyata declined to disclose how many people they are dealing with through the platform as a whole, but he said that they are adjusting pricing plans so that a corporate user can use it for about $5 per employee.
With the recent spread of telework, the market has expanded, and in November 2020, the number of companies registered with “SmartHR” exceeded 30,000.
Purpose of Launching SmartHR
Japan’s labor force continues to decline, and the challenges faced by countries and businesses to improve productivity are becoming more serious. As one solution to this problem, while the improvement of work efficiency using technology is accepted by society, the importance of “improving the environment in which one wants to work” by companies is increasing, not just improving efficiency.
The company will utilize the funds procured to strongly promote the utilization of personnel and labor information data for the purpose of “improving the environment in which we want to work” by companies, in addition to improving the efficiency of operations in the personnel and labor fields. Also they want to create examples of utilization in a wide range of industries regarding visualization and improvement of corporate conditions using existing functions such as employee surveys and analysis report functions, and propose to society a human resources management model suitable for the Japanese labor market in the future. In addition, we will focus on developing functions for human resources management that will support the improvement of corporate
