Mizuho & Resona provide debt financing to FAKEBUSTERS

Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech
Published in
2 min readAug 13, 2023

IVA, operators of “FAKEBUSTERS”, an AI authentication service with the leading market share in Japan, raised a total of approximately JPY 800m through the issuance of J-KISS stock acquisition rights to Mercari, family office De Capital, and multiple other individual investors, as well as loans from multiple financial institutions. This was the first funding round for IVA, which has been in business for five years.

The funds will be used to strengthen AI technology, expand the appraisal capacity, and develop new businesses, in anticipation of future growth and global expansion for ​​”FAKEBUSTERS”.

IVA has an appraisal team with diverse backgrounds, state-of-the-art specialized equipment, and AI appraisal technology, and the cumulative number of appraisals has exceeded 1.5 million. FAKEBUSTERS provide appraisal services that meet the varying needs of their customers, such as quick appraisals based on images and complete appraisals based on the actual item.

The FAKEBUSTERS service covers 88 brands, including sneaker brands, luxury brands, apparel brands, and accessory brands, and plans to add further brands in the future, based on customer demand.

Currently, in addition to Japanese, FAKEBUSTERS supports English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean, and 9 major currencies. Starting with the establishment of an entity in Taiwan in June 2023, FAKEBUSTERS are planning further overseas expansion, and in August will establish a branch office in China. The next steps, without a definite timeline yet, are offices into South Korea, Southeast Asia, and North America, to further accelerate the global expansion of FAKEBUSTERS.

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Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech

Passionate about strategy & innovation across Asia. At home in Japan. Connector of people & ideas.