Y Combinator, Global Brain back Tailor, a headless Japanese ERP startup TechCrunch
Tailorsan enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform based in Japan, said today it has raised $4.3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Global brain.
Founded in 2021 by Yo Shibata and Misato Takahashi, Tailor offers a headless ERP platform, meaning an ERP without a user interface, instead providing data from back-office systems such as documents. and shop to other apps via the API, Shibata told TechCrunch.
Legacy ERP systems are provided by companies such as SAP, Oracle and NetSuite (owned by Oracle) and local companies such as OBIC, which is difficult to customize for users, according to Shibata. One of the reasons is that their systems are often built for the world’s largest organizations, making them unsuitable and expensive for small and medium-sized enterprises’ projects, Shibata said, which often makes customers This ERP customer is frustrated by the large number of features and the complexity of the user interface, he added.
Japanese businesses suffer from high maintenance costs and slow development. The company says about 70% of software industry spending in Japan goes to building custom products.
Shibata claims that Tailor’s API-driven approach will make it easier for businesses to integrate with another third-party SaaS engine and help users build tailor-made in-house tools faster. .
Serial entrepreneurs Shibata and Misato previously founded a retail technology company Spotlight and sell it to Rakuten for $20 million in 2013. They reunited again last year for a bigger challenge, aiming to enter the global market with Tailor’s ERP platform and with an ambitious goal is $1 billion in revenue.
The Japanese startup currently has one client and 10 employees, but plans to double its headcount to 20 employees by the end of the year. With the seed money, the company will enhance its product capabilities and developer integration features, Shibata said. In addition, the company intends to prepare the product for developers in the US and sell it in the US market, aiming for 2023.
“We aim to transform the way businesses build in-house business software,” said Shibata.
