The future’s bright, the future’s… global?
It’s rare to find a Japanese SaaS startup that has achieved significant success abroad. In fact, almost none have.
The past few years have been a boom time for Japanese startups, and among this new generation of founders there are many who are determined to make an impact overseas. Their motivations are different, but I’d say the common through line is a desire to compete, and to be successful, at the highest level—and not just in their culturally safe home market, which is notoriously difficult for foreign companies to penetrate.
I’m not Japanese, but we are a Japanese company and Attuned is a Japanese startup, even if our team is very international. Even before we launched Attuned, there was a vision to create a global product: we built the initial algorithms in Berlin, but ultimately returned to Tokyo when we realised it wasn’t the right market for us at that point in time.
Over the next couple of years, we iterated and trial-and-error’d our way through constant hustle to early product/market fit. We began to find appreciation for our product within large Japanese enterprises, delivering them meaningful value through our SaaS-based Intrinsic Motivation software.
Having found sales repeatability within Japan, we’re now embracing our second attempt at international growth, driven by the desire to get back to our original vision: to build a global product that impacts at scale.
We have a small team in Tokyo focused on expansion beyond our domestic shores, and we’ve already made some encouraging progress abroad. We’ve been able to win and work closely with customers from Ireland to Nigeria, from Romania to Malaysia, as well as big names in the US such as Salesforce and even an aviation unit of the US Navy.
However, our international growth is not yet at a repeatable, predictable stage. And so, being cognizant of the various shoals that have grounded other ambitious Japanese SaaS startups and sunk their dreams of world domination, we decided to try something different. That thinking is what led us to apply for Orange Fab Asia, a global-expansion-focused accelerator program for startups in Japan, Korea and Taiwan run by French multinational telco Orange. Happily, our application was accepted, and the program kicked off in earnest this week.
Learning to fly
We’re keen to get to know our peer startups in the program, which come from a variety of industries. In our cohort, there is satellite-based-geospatial-intelligence company Synspective; Kisvin Sciences, an enterprise that tracks sap-flow in plants; 5G-powering battery startup Autonom; and BPV Solutions, a company specializing in AI/ML solutions for telco networks. It’s an inspiring group in which everyone is thinking big. Some are a couple of steps ahead of us, which is ideal as those are always the most relevant people to learn from: someone who has recently faced the problems you’re facing. We’re keen to hear about and learn from their experiences.
We’re also looking forward to meeting Orange’s international group of mentors, who will hopefully unearth some nuggets of insight that will steer us clear of potential pitfalls, while we are super excited to tap into Orange’s international group of corporate partners, companies like Airbus, AXA, Havas, Valeo and many more. And then there is, of course, Orange itself. We are particularly keen to make connections in European and African countries, where we have felt Attuned’s mission reflected with reverberated interest.
It’s been a long time since I’ve stood on stage at a pitch day, but I’m looking forward to our demo day at Orange Fab later this year, when I’ll be standing on a (virtual?) stage, hopefully at the culmination of our international growth efforts coalescing to a faster, more repeatable pace of growth, and putting us onto our intended trajectory: to make work more meaningful through Intrinsic Motivation, globally.