MUFG Innovation Partners Investment Tracker
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s (MUFG’s) 100% owned corporate venture capital (CVC) arm called Innovation Partners (MUIP) has made its third and fourth investments out of its MUFG Innovation Partners №1 Investment Partnership, a fund launched in January with a commitment of JPY 20bn (USD 180m). And sources close to the management team tell us the fifth investment is not far off!
Please see also our previous reporting:
bookee
bookee, founded in 2018, is an operator of an online and onsite service program offered to provide advice on financial products such as insurance, mortgages and investment products. MUIP is the company’s first outside investor.
The company offers various courses for money management, based on the well-known programs of Financial Academy, which have been in the market since 2002. bookee offers a 60 minutes free trial courses only for women. Their office locations are in Ginza, Marunouchi, Omotesando and Ikebukuro, with Shibuya and Shinjuku to be announced soon.
Given MUIP’s investment objectives include leveraging the investee’s products into MUFG, one can expect bookee becoming available to MUFG customers to help increase financial literacy.
Symphony
Symphony provides a cloud-based, secure team collaboration platform which aims to transform the way users communicate effectively and securely with a single workflow application. Its secure platform is based on advanced end-to-end encryption technology that meets the high-level security standards sought by global financial institutions, and other industries. Symphony was originally created by a consortium comprised of 15 financial institutions.
MUIP appears to be the lead investor in this USD 165m funding round, alongside Standard Chartered. The funding brings Symphony’s total capital raised to date to over USD 460m and values the company at around USD 1.3bn, a modest rise from USD1bn two years ago.
With the newly raised funding, Symphony is looking to expand beyond messaging to become the standard collaboration workflow platform for its community. Again, one can expect MUFG to become an early adopter and vocal supporter.
Tokyo FinTech was honored to welcome CEO David Gurle to a meetup in August 2018. You can view the recording here:
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