Contact management service Sansan gets $26m to tackle Southeast Asia

Even in the age of social media and smartphones, exchanging business cards remains to be common practice. This is particularly true in Japan, where such nicety is customary. However, these bits of paper are easily misplaced or forgotten, which could lead to missed business opportunities.

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This was something that Sansan, a Tokyo-based business card management solution provider, sought to address when it started out 11 years ago.  The platform provides corporate clients with scanning and contact management solutions, focusing on accurate digitization of business cards. The company claims that it does this better than anyone else.

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“We contractually guarantee 99.9 percent accuracy using our proprietary optical character recognition software. Our staff will also check every single card to confirm accuracy,” Sansan co-founder and director Kei Tomioka tells Tech in Asia.

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Sansan complements this with content management system (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) functionalities, where all the digitized data is accessible via web or mobile app.

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Today, Sansan announced it has raised US$26.4 million (JPY 3 billion) in series E funding to take its solution to more markets. The round was led by Japan Post Capital, T. Rowe Price, SBI Investment, and DCM Ventures.

nNext stop: Southeast Asian

When asked if rapid digitalization is a threat to Sansan’s business model, Tomioka believes physical business cards will always be in demand and appreciated. “Just like handshakes,” he quips.

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Sansan is aiming to be “an indispensable corporate resource.” With its solution mainly designed for the Japanese market, the startup’s major challenge is serving the needs of the international market.

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The global market is “new to us and it’s hard to rapidly adapt services to suit each of the markets’ distinct requirements,” explains Tomioka.

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The fresh capital will be used to drive the company’s expansion into Southeast Asia, where it opened a Singapore office in 2015. Tomioka thinks that like Japan, the city-state has a culture of exchanging business cards.

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“Singapore also hosts a wide array of global and regional headquarters across multiple industries and sectors,” he says. “It’s the ideal testbed for us to expand our services outside Japan, as well as to optimize them based on the needs of the other markets.”