Rakuten looks to the world to launch a 100 million dollar global investment fund

Absrtact: June has just drawn to a close, and the Japanese electric business giant Lotte is still busy to stop. In the past six months, in addition to spending 900 million of dollars on the acquisition of information applications Viber, they also through the tens of millions of dollars in Southeast Asia venture funds to help a series of East

The June has just drawn to a close, and Japan's electric business giant Lotte is still busy to stop. In the past six months, in addition to spending 900 million of dollars on the acquisition of information applications Viber, they also helped a range of technology companies in Southeast Asia and Japan through their tens of millions of dollars in south-East Asia's VC funds, including Consumer-to-consumer trading platform Application Carousell, image recognition technology company Visenze, Mobile payment Services CODA payments and file sharing services send anywhere and so on.

Now, Rakuten has turned its sights around the world, launching 100 million of dollars in global investment funds, mainly for start-ups in Israel, the Asia Pacific and the US.

The new fund, headquartered in Singapore, will be managed by Saeminahn, an executive partner of Rakuten Ventures. Saemin Ahn said in an interview that the new fund will continue to focus on companies with technology that can provide users with a better experience. Over time, it will also focus on ecosystem, technology and financial returns.

Although Rakuten has yet to disclose what to do next, it is largely certain that it is a "strategic" start-up and that it is possible to eventually switch from investment to a wholly-owned acquisition.

While Saemin Ahn said the fund would not focus on investing in mobile technology companies, the observation that Rakuten had previously invested in South-East Asia seemed to revolve around mobile technology. For example, to do Consumer-to-consumer Carousell, as well as electronic payment services codapayments, and the development of visual search Visenze.

For the past two years, Rakuten's investments and acquisitions seem to be preparing for an equal rival to Amazon. In addition to Viber, Rakuten's acquisition also includes 315 million of dollars in cash into its electronic-reading platform Kobo, 200 million-dollar streaming video service Viki, and streaming video service wuaki.tv from Spain (the amount is undisclosed). In May 2012, Rakuten also invested $100 million in Pinterest, which Pinterest's company valued at $1.5 billion trillion.

Saemin Ahn declined to comment specifically on Rakuten's overall strategy, but said the company's investments had been sufficiently diversified.

"If you look at Rakuten as a whole, you will find that the company is always firmly following its plan, stabilizing its castles and cities," Saemin Ahn said. "Our castles are e-commerce, and we have multi-storey cities that keep our users in Rakuten's ecosystem." It is said that Google's Castle is a search technology, the city is Android and YouTube. In a way, Rakuten is also implementing such a framework. ”