A look at Rakuten's troubled MVNO, which has about 2.5% marketshare in Japan; Rakuten has posted 13 straight quarters of operating loss totaling roughly $5.5B
Anton Bridge / Reuters :
After losing billions on mobile bets, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten raised ~$1.9B for mobile and plans to sell stakes of its banking and securities units
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Group Inc. sold 250 billion yen ($1.9 billion) of bonds on Friday, giving the company …
SmartBank, which offers a prepaid card and finance app in Japan, has raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $30M
Shota Horii, his twin brother Yuta Horii and Jun Taketani co-founded SmartBank in 2019 after selling their previous startup Fablic, a Japanese online secondhand marketplace, to Rakuten in 2016.
QuEra Computing, which is building a commercially accessible cloud-based quantum device, emerges from stealth with $17M from Rakuten and others
QuEra Computing, a Boston-based quantum computer developer, is coming out of stealth mode today with $17 million in funding from Rakuten, Day One Ventures and Frontiers Capital.
AST & Science raises $110M Series B led by Rakuten and Vodafone to build a broadband network via a constellation of satellites that link directly to smartphones
Caleb Henry / SpaceNews.com :
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten launches crypto exchange for trading in bitcoin, ether, and bitcoin cash, via an Android app, with no fees for making trades
Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has launched its own exchange for crypto spot trading. — Announced Monday …
Viber launches Viber Local Number, a new $4.99/month subscription service to give users a phone number that anyone can call or text, in the US, UK, and Canada
Viber, the chat and messaging app acquired by Japanese ecommerce titan Rakuten for $900 million five years ago …
Rakuten's stake in Lyft is now worth $2.46B, GM's $1.46B, Fidelity's $1.45B, a16z's $1.18B, Alphabet's $924M, Logan Green's $655M, and John Zimmer's $452M
Alison Griswold / Quartz :
Sources: Rakuten, which owns a 13% stake in Lyft, made the investment in 2015 after data from its consumer purchase tracker Slice showed Lyft was undervalued
Ari Levy / CNBC : Tweets: @r0unak , @jonorcutt , @mdudas , @mattrosoff , @ranimolla , and @joshelman Tweets: Rounak Jain / @r0unak : Rakuten invested in Lyft after they found the company was underval...
Lyft S-1: 2018 revenue of $2.2B up 100% YoY, gross bookings of $8.1B from 1B+ rides, loss of $911M, up 32% YoY, 39% market share in the US, up from 22% in 2017
So Are Losses Walter Frick / HBR.org : The Strategy Question at the Center of Lyft's IPO Axios : Lyft files first for IPO in litmus test for the industry Harper Neidig / The Hill : Lyft files to go pu...