Rakuten Mobile to acquire Estmob

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Rakuten Mobile Inc announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire Estmob, Inc, a South Korean peer-to-peer file transfer solution start-up that created Send Anywhere. The acquisition will establish a research and development presence in South Korea for Rakuten Symphony and leverage Estmob’s top-class developer team and existing technology to accelerate product development for Rakuten Symphony’s internet and ecosystem services. Estmob will continue to enhance and grow Send Anywhere and other products and will aim to integrate the service through Rakuten Symphony in the future.

Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Symphony, commented: “I’m thrilled to welcome the Estmob team to Rakuten Symphony and to work with its very talented team to develop leading platform products for our mobile operator customers around the world.”

Yoon-Sik Oh, CEO of Estmob, said: “We are excited to join the Rakuten group, one of Japan’s most innovative companies. We will continue to do our best to ensure that Estmob and Rakuten Symphony services are firmly well-positioned in the market.”

The Rakuten Symphony internet and ecosystem service business group will work with software development teams across Rakuten Group to develop a mediation layer to integrate all standalone products from membership, loyalty, payment, media, gaming and cloud storage platforms into a unified Rakuten Symphony portfolio. The group will also develop unified design guidelines and act as a department to unify the product user interface across all products by guiding and verifying the execution of design guidelines.

Based in Seoul, Estmob started in 2012 to tackle the problem of how to most efficiently send files between two devices. The company developed Send Anywhere, a peer-to-peer real time file transfer service with more than 43 million users around the world. Popular among users in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom, users utilize the service to collaborate and share digital content in a secure way on any platform through a mobile application or web interface. In 2019, Estmob launched a cloud service, Sendy, that has evolved into a collaborative tool by adding cloud functions on Send Anywhere’s powerful technology. Sendy is expanding its range of users mainly around Japan, followed by Korea and the United States. Its monthly active users are rapidly growing to YoY 245% and app downloads to YoY 623%.

Rakuten investment arm Rakuten Capital, through its early stage investment fund Rakuten Ventures, has been supporting Estmob from its first seed round in 2014.

Source: Rakuten