Asia-based Gree Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of mobile social media company Gree, has invested alongside strategic investor SalesForce.com, a customer relationship management (CRM) software and cloud computing company, and Japan-based venture capital investor, Mobile Internet Capital, in a seed round of funding worth YEN625m ($6.6m) in Japan-based Accounting SaaS Japan (A-SaaS). The start-up provides Japanese accounting firms with computer systems and software solutions. Details of any previous rounds were not published.
Computer systems used at Japanese accounting firms have been mostly dominated by a few vendors for a long time. As part of the deal, SalesForce.com will partner with A-SaaS to enable the start-up to offer clients new computing solutions. SalesForce.com and A-SaaS will jointly intensify sales and marketing effort, according to the news report.
There are about 32,500 accounting firms in Japan with nearly 80 per cent of their systems dominated by Japan’s top three accounting firms, according to venture news site, startup-dating.com. A-SaaS expects to replace 5,000 systems with their own product by the end of 2017, which accounts for 15.4 per cent of all accounting firms in the country.
A-Saas was founded in 2009 by Toshinao Morisaki, a former president of a subsidiary of accounting solution vendor JDL.
