Company has also raised 45 million yen, mainly from individual investors
TOKYO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sake information provider SakeWiz Co., Ltd. (Location: Setagaya-ku, Tokyo; President: Manabu Mori; below, “SakeWiz”) has announced the launch of their sake brewery tour information site, Sake Tourism (https://saketourism.sakewiz.com), available in 4 languages (Japanese, English, Traditional Chinese, and Korean).
In addition, on September 6, 2019 the company raised a total of 45 million yen through a third-party share allocation to 10 individual investors.
SakeWiz will use the capital raised to enhance the development of services and to focus on marketing, in order to communicate the appeal of sake brewery tours, both in Japan and overseas, through Sake Tourism (*1), and to help to popularize Japanese sake around the world.
In addition, by strengthening integration with the already-released SakeWiz app (*2), and sharing it with users, we hope to increase users’ knowledge of sake and contribute to the further development of the sake industry as a proud symbol of Japanese culture.
(*1) About Sake Tourism
Up until now, each brewery has distributed information on brewery tours individually, but because information coverage was incomplete, consumers weren’t able to search for tours to match their preferences.
In addition, although interest among overseas visitors to Japan is high, it has been difficult for them to participate in sake brewery tours because of the lack of information in foreign languages.
Sake Tourism aims to solve these problems by publishing information on brewery tours, starting with 34 breweries, and expanding to 100 by the end of the year.
(*2) About the SakeWiz sake app
Using a specialized app which was officially released in May 2018, users can simply take a photo of a sake bottle label, and the app will recognize the image using AI, and provide information on that sake brand.
The app has records for about 11,000 types of sake, and can be used in four languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. It has been released in nine countries: Japan, the USA, the UK, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, and Canada.