May 30, 2024

New Investment: Yoii, Enabling Ambitious Entrepreneurs to Achieve Quick, Simple, and Secured Funding By Jinqian Ma Published on May 30, 2024 We are thrilled to announce our investment in Yoii, Inc. With Yoii's mission, “Boost liquidity, empower daring entrepreneurs and businesses,” their service, Yoii Fuel, provides revenue-based financing (RBF) to startups, leveraging their future revenue for immediate growth capital. This enables entrepreneurs and mid-sized companies having funding challenges to gain more opportunities to raise capital. Providing fast and non-dilutive financing When startups need to raise much-needed capital, there are various approaches, but major methods could land in corporate loans, issuance of new stocks, or investment from venture capitalists. However, startups face some challenges with those methods; equity financing could lead to dilution and be expensive, the potential of some startups, especially the early-stage ones, cannot be fitted into the traditional banks’ valuing system, and equity and financing negotiations can be time-consuming. Those barriers are attributed to preventing startups from essentially fundraising to grow their businesses. Yoii’s RBF Platform, Yoii Fuel, can be one of the solutions to tackle the issues. RBF is one of the innovative approaches to funding, analyzing past sales data to forecast future earnings and convert a fixed percentage of future sales in exchange for money invested. RBF has been increasing its awareness as a non-dilutive form of financing and retaining equity (no requirement to transfer or reduce company ownership and shares), allowing entrepreneurs to keep ownership of their businesses. In addition, RBF has become one of the major funding methods, especially among SaaS startups due to avoiding the risk of joining guarantees and collateral in debts and allowing quick acquisition of funds. In the Yoii Fuel, companies with revenue records for over 6 months (available for revenue from a few million yen) and at least 4 months of working capital secured, are eligible for their services. The funding process is easy and simple as well, and it has only three steps to follow and get funded in 6 business days at the earliest. Meet the team Yoii was founded in April 2021 by Co-founder and CEO of Masaharu Uno, and Co-founder and CTO, Tasuku Omori. The abundant experience of Masaharu Uno in the fintech field reflects a depth of knowledge to thrive in their business. He started his career in sales in direct marketing and advertising planning at one of the well-known Japanese production business companies. Throughout his career, he had opportunities to communicate with adtech startups, and their potential and sense of speed intrigued him. Task Omori holds a B.S. in Information Physics & Computing from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. He was a lead engineer at Stake Technologies, a blockchain infrastructure developer. Why we are excited to invest Yoii is the first company to bring RBF into the Japanese market, diversifying the financing options for small and medium-sized Japanese companies and startups facing funding challenges. We believe that Yoii's services have a high potential impact, as they will help revitalize the startup ecosystem in Japan. We invested in them because we believe in their mission and vision to provide entrepreneurs with a wide variety of options for funding and opportunities to grow their businesses by offering new financing methods. Plug and Play is one of the most active VCs in Silicon Valley . Our goal is to fund the teams building the defensible businesses of the future. Join our ecosystem today .