This is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.
PR TIMES & IDEAS FOR GOOD, Vol. 7
Two press releases this edition, both in the B2B SaaS category—which reflects where a significant portion of Japanese startup investment is flowing.
This week's two releases:
- KnowledgeWork closes Series A (2nd close) with Salesforce Ventures, UserBase, Sansan, and One Capital
- SimpleForm launches SimpleCheck and raises 700 million yen in Series A
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1. KnowledgeWork: Sales Enablement for Japanese Enterprise
KnowledgeWork completed a 200 million yen third-party allotment as the second close of its Series A round, with investors including Salesforce Ventures, UserBase, Sansan, and One Capital. The funds will go toward expanding sales enablement adoption in Japan and deepening partnerships with sales-adjacent enterprise companies.
What sales enablement is: Sales enablement is the discipline of systematically improving sales team performance—through better content, consistent methodology, coaching tools, and shared knowledge. The goal is to reduce the performance gap between the best and average salespeople by capturing what top performers do and making it available to everyone.
Why this matters in Japan: Sales practices in Japanese companies tend toward one of two extremes. Either the company has standardized high-level process (the CRM stage definitions, the approval workflow) but has left individual judgment and technique entirely to each salesperson—or there is almost no standardization at all. In both cases, critical sales knowledge remains locked in individual minds and is lost when people change roles.
Sales enablement platforms create common language and frameworks that allow knowledge to be shared and applied consistently. The involvement of Salesforce Ventures and Sansan—both companies deeply embedded in Japanese enterprise sales—suggests strong strategic alignment for distribution.
2. SimpleCheck: Removing the Due Diligence Bottleneck
SimpleForm launched SimpleCheck, a cloud-based software that automates corporate due diligence workflows, and raised 700 million yen in Series A funding. The company plans to extend the product to cover sole proprietors as well.
The problem it solves: When financial institutions or B2B companies onboard new corporate clients, they must conduct due diligence—verifying corporate registration, checking for legal or financial issues, confirming ownership structures. This process has historically been manual, time-consuming, and scattered across multiple data sources.
The regulatory context: increased requirements for financial service non-face-to-face verification (accelerated by COVID) and tighter compliance regulations created a bottleneck that was limiting onboarding speed.
SimpleCheck's role: By integrating corporate data sources and automating the verification workflow, SimpleCheck converts what was a multi-hour manual process into an automated check. This reduces legal and compliance team workload while improving coverage (automated systems don't miss steps when busy or tired).
My reaction: I initially assumed corporate due diligence automation already existed in Japan. The fact that it largely didn't—that this represented a real gap—is a useful reminder that "obvious" automation opportunities are still abundant in enterprise workflows. The most interesting business opportunities are often in the gaps that everyone assumes have been solved but haven't been.
The downstream effect is also worth noting: if automated due diligence reduces the cost and friction of onboarding, it particularly benefits newer and smaller companies with limited credit history who otherwise struggle to be accepted as customers by larger institutions. This can meaningfully accelerate the startup ecosystem.
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