AGRIBUDDY was founded by myself who although is a Japanese, our business has nothing to do with Japan, company is based in Hong Kong and our business model is not such a model that will be listed on a Japanese stock exchange. Under such circumstances, I figured it will be difficult to source the necessary funds from Japan, nor it will be an advantage to our business and its future plans by doing so, I always thought that it will be beneficial to work together with global investment funds out of Japan. But, since my ability of communicating in English is very limited comparing with my mother tongue, I thought that there was going to be “Giant Walls” that we had to get over at some point in our journey when I first started AGRIBUDDY, and back then I knew that I had no means or wits of getting over that wall.
Although I am a business man, I do not have a character of a serial entrepreneur, I have never experienced fund raising or third-party allocation of funds in my life of over forty years, and I had no idea of what people were talking about when I heard phrases such as series A fund raising or seed stage investment. For us, it was a bilingual (JP/ENG) venture capitalist who initially participated in the seed stage investment (ultra-risk funds) of AGRIBUDDY, Mr. Noriaki Okubo has a history of actively engaging in overseas M&A of trendy companies, and it was exciting to have him on the board member at the initial stage.
In addition, Mr. Yorihiko Kato who had participated in our business from the Cambodian agricultural plantation company before we spun off AGRIBUDDY as an independent project, he was also the one who made the suggestion of going independent and has always been the most supportive element of our team, we did have the vision of “Procuring funds from international investors out of Japan” back then but it wasn’t even at the seed stage of the business and we were a small agriculture startup in Cambodia which is a small country in SEA with not much positive images for conducting business. Having Mr. Kato on our team was positive for AGRIBUDDY because we could proudly introduce our project to investors with his backup. He was the reason why investors took the time to hear us out, and back then we had no other way, he has been supporting our activities side by side on procuring the funds and this is why we were able to complete the process. Here are some articles about this:
http://ken5.jp/kengo/archives/2500
http://katou.jp/?eid=575
The next round will no longer be an excuse. We must connect to international investment institutions and prove that we have a solid future. After the first procurement of funds in February 2017, we replaced the board member from Mr. Kato to Ms. Shigeta, who lives in India, and we also actively employed senior management personnel. Among them was Mr. Rajesh, an Indian who I highly appreciate. We sent him to the pitch event in April 2018 (NEST 2018) to test his abilities, I had been appearing in the pitch events in Japan (in Japanese) and one several events in a row, but in this occasion, I decided to send Mr. Rajesh and prepared the presentation in English. The result was he pushed the winners of every local pitch events in the country and won at a tie along with Pocket Marche, which brought great hope for us towards our future developments.
http://ken5.jp/kengo/archives/2515
http://katou.jp/?eid=585
In July, the MD of our Cambodian firm Mr. Pak joined us, it is no exaggeration to say that he is the second founder, and at this timing the business starts to form into shape, but I think I will write about that in a different occasion. As we had won several pitch events in Japan and receiving contacts from various investment institutions in Japan, sometimes we also hold presentations towards foreign investment institutions, so it is inevitable to prepare all presentation materials in both Japanese and English, it is complicated because the order we build the conversation and the composition of the story is totally different in the two languages.
Mr. Rajesh wasn’t confident in the creation of such presentation materials, so I had to do all the creation of the materials, then we brushed up the presentation in English, that is how we started anyway. Last November, Ms. Shigeta contacted us about an event “Farm to Fork” held in Bangalore, this was hosted by Mistletoe and asked if we wanted to join. Mr. Rajesh was already in Bangalore to attend the event, but Ms. Shigeta contacted me just before the event and told me that I had to be the one on stage, she said that there were several influential investors including Mr. Taizo Son, and it would be the perfect occasion to present AGRIBUDDY directly to them. So, that’s how I ended up talking amongst many Indian agricultural venture startups as a panelist, the change was finalized on the day of the event.
As a result, we were able to impress Mr. Taizo, he commented “you have a wonderful approach, please let us support you” and he decided to join the series A fund procurement, Ms. Shigeta’s precise judgement in all of this was proven in its best form. Actually, I was invited to the pitch events in Japan after appearing at NIKKEI Fintech, but this event was also a suggestion by Ms. Shigeta. I am always thinking that my compatibility with Ms. Shigeta is really good. (I don’t know how she feels about this but anyway…)
I could not thank her enough of the efforts she made physically and mentally till the end of the series A round, if I would say that Mr. Kato was the key person in the last rounds, then Ms. Shigeta is definitely the key person of this round. In that sense, I think the timing of changing the board member to her from Mr. Kato was impeccable.
Some may raise questions saying that since Mr. Taizo from Mistletoe made investment, we are not global at all. What is great about Mistletoe is that they have an international team based in Singapore, all staff of different nationalities communicate in English and is a “complete global investment institution”. Of course, Mr. Taizo and Mr. Taira, the managing director will be there to support, but basically all communication with the team committed with AGRIBUDDY is going to be conducted in English. And this is already showing positive impact, which is negotiations with other investment agencies. One of the members was proficient in both corporate finance and English and he played the role of a lead investor and took the opportunity to talk to other candidates for investment.
What I think is one of the big achievements of this round is that the local Cambodian VC and insurance company made a positive evaluation of AGRIBUDDY and made an investment. Receiving investment from companies who understands this country, actually doing business here and delivering results, gaining their trust and cooperation, this fact is very encouraging for AGRIBUDDY and the high expectation value is also encouraging for us too. Nonetheless, even though they had assessed AGRIBUDDY to some extent before the investment was finalized, and even with the support from Mistletoe’s team, I was totally helpless with the final negotiations and reading through all the final rules and fine print of the contract. Perhaps it does not matter whether it is written in Japanese, because the detailed rules are all based on corporate finance and I have no clue on the subject. Mr. Okubo was the one who supported me through this. Although AGRIBUDDY are already in a business partnership with Forte, it was Mr. Okubo who connected us to the top management of Forte for their strategic business alliance investment.
As a result, four global investment companies; Mistletoe of Singapore, Smart Axiata Digital Innovation Fund, a company run by one of the leading mobile phone companies in Cambodia, FORTE Investment Holdings which is the leading insurance company of Cambodia and INDEX: Design to Improve Life from Denmark, has agreed to invest in our company. I think I can say that we have climbed over one of the “Giant Walls” I visualized at the beginning. Although I knew that I had no ability to do so, with the support and cooperation of so many around us, we made it. And I am sure there will be many more obstacles we have to overcome during our long journey. But I believe with the team we have, and as long as we can all challenge this mission, we will be able to overcome anything.