tailora Japan-based back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, today said 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 with no front-end, instead delivering data from back office systems such as finance and purchasing to other applications via API, Shibata told to gotechbusiness.com.
Legacy ERPs provided by companies such as SAP, Oracle and NetSuite (owned by Oracle) and local players such as OBIC, according to Shibata, are difficult for users to customize. One reason is that their systems are typically built for the world’s largest organizations, making them unsuitable and expensive for small and medium-sized business projects, Shibata said, often leaving these ERP customers frustrated with the sheer number of features and complexity. complexity of the user interface, he added.
Japanese enterprises face high maintenance costs and slow development. The company says that about 70% of the software industry’s spending in Japan goes toward building custom products.
Shibata claims Tailor’s API-first approach should make it easier for businesses to integrate with another third-party SaaS tool and help users build their custom in-house tools faster.
Serial Entrepreneurs Shibata and Misato Have Previously Founded a Retail Tech Company Spotlight and sold it to Rakuten for $20 million in 2013. Last year they reunited for a bigger challenge, with the goal of entering the global market with Tailor’s ERP platform and with the ambitious goal of hitting $1 billion in revenue.
The Japanese startup currently has one customer and 10 employees, but plans to double its workforce to 20 employees by the end of this year. With the seed money, the company will improve its product capabilities and developer onboarding features, Shibata said. In addition, the company plans to prepare the product for developers in the US and sell it in the US market, with a target of 2023.
“We want to transform the way to build the in-house business software for enterprises,” said Shibata.
