Jan 5, 2016

The Medley team: CEO Kohei Takiguchi stands on the third from the left, Co-CEO/medical doctor Goichiro Toyoda stands on the right. See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based startup Medley announced in December that it has fundraised a total of 230 million yen (about $1.9 million) from Nikkei Business Publications (Nikkei BP) , East Ventures , and Japanese angel investor Yuzuru Honda. East Ventures have invested in Medley in the past while Honda is the CEO of Japanese adtech company FreakOut (TSE:6094). The latest funding follows the company’s previous round in June of 2015, having raised 300 million yen (about $2.5 million) from Mitsui Sumitomo Insuarance Capital , MRT (TSE:6034, medical human resource), Gree (TSE:3632, mobile gaming), and other angel investors. Medley provides an online job board for medical professionals, called Job Medley , as well as an online disease encyclopedia called Medley . Coinciding with the latest funds, Medley will partner with Nikkei BP to integrate Job Medley with Nikkei Medical Online , the publisher’s comprehensive information portal site for medical professionals. By utilizing the mutual strengths of both companies, they are looking to develop new services for 510,000 registered users of the portal site, encompassing 130,000 medical doctors. Medley CEO Kohei Takiguchi explained: Combining Nikkei Medical Online with our strength that engineers and medical professionals provide our services, I believe that both companies can better grow their businesses leveraging the mutual strengths. The capital raised from this fundraising will be used to develop new collaborative services and for their operation. Although there is no official release of service content, they are creating brand new content for healthcare professionals. We were told that the funds will be used to develop and operate a new service. Details of that are not yet disclosed but the company claimed that it will be something new for medical professionals. The Job Medley platform has been steadily growing to date, building a sold revenue base for the company. It lists 47,055 positions for job-seeking medical professionals as of this writing. Instead of such a huge number of job postings, however, Takiguchi says that his team have fulfilled only about 10% of their objective which expects to list all positions available online. Medley, the online medical resource, has been attempting enhancing its service coverage, by adding a special feature page for prevention of influenza as well as a hospital search according to symptoms or the method of treatment. These efforts are based on the team’s intention to improve an accessibility to existing medical database services for the public.Takiguchi added: Since existing medical database services are incomplete, we needed to build our own from scratch. It took more than expected to complete, but we have almost completed gathering and organizing symptoms, medical supplies, hospitals, and other related metadata information. We think that the next step is to give users the value based on our database. Based on the symptom-based disease search function as well as the infection risk prediction model, we will explore new types of online medical services for users in 2016. Medley has been receiving huge funding throughout 2015. The company has been devoted to developing the Job Medley platform to enhance the business prospects while developing the Medley database service to better serve users. They are steadily moving forward to disrupt the medical industry by inventing new online services. TAGS