It’s rare to find a Japanese SaaS startup that has achieved significant success abroad. In fact, almost none have.

The past few years have been a boom time for Japanese startups, and among this new generation of founders there are many who are determined to make an impact overseas. Their motivations are different, but I’d say the common through line is a desire to compete, and to be successful, at the highest level—and not just in their culturally safe home market, which is notoriously difficult for foreign companies to penetrate.

I’m not Japanese, but we are a Japanese company and Attuned is a Japanese startup, even if our team is very international. Even before we launched Attuned, there was a vision to create a global product: we built the initial algorithms in Berlin, but ultimately returned to Tokyo when we realised it wasn’t the right market for us at that point in time.

Over the next couple of years, we iterated and trial-and-error’d our way through constant hustle to early product/market fit. We began to find appreciation for our product within large Japanese enterprises, delivering them meaningful value through our SaaS-based Intrinsic Motivation software.

Having found sales repeatability within Japan, we’re now embracing our second attempt at international growth, driven by the desire to get back to our original vision: to build a global product that impacts at scale. 

We have a small team in Tokyo focused on expansion beyond our domestic shores, and we’ve already made some encouraging progress abroad. We’ve been able to win and work closely with customers from Ireland to Nigeria, from Romania to Malaysia, as well as big names in the US such as Salesforce and even an aviation unit of the US Navy. 

However, our international growth is not yet at a repeatable, predictable stage. And so, being cognizant of the various shoals that have grounded other ambitious Japanese SaaS startups and sunk their dreams of world domination, we decided to try something different. That thinking is what led us to apply for Orange Fab Asia, a global-expansion-focused accelerator program for startups in Japan, Korea and Taiwan run by French multinational telco Orange. Happily, our application was accepted, and the program kicked off in earnest this week.