TOKYO--(Business Wire/Korea Newswire) February 12, 2015 -- Metaps Inc. (HQ: Tokyo, CEO: Katsuaki Sato, hereafter “Metaps”) announced that they have completed a $36 million Series C round of financing, headed by pre-existing and multiple new stakeholders in Japan and with the participation of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Regarding the new business partnerships formed in this round of funding, plans are to reveal details later this year.

CEO Katsuaki Sato commented, “At this stage of our growth we felt the timing was right to bring in more outside funding to help our AI and financial services initiatives reach the next level. We are already a trusted monetization partner for app developers worldwide, and we are expanding into a solutions provider for all e-commerce companies and smart device developers.”

Metaps was selected by Forbes Japan as one of the “Top Startups” in Japan for 2014, and Sato featured as one of the top 10 young entrepreneurs in Japan.

Metaps offers a one-stop app monetization platform “metaps”, supporting app analytics, user acquisition and monetization. The metaps Platform improves the efficiency and automation of app marketing by learning the patterns of users through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The infrastructure of the metaps Platform has expanded to reach over 100 million app users through their network, which includes apps that have been downloaded a total of over 1.2 billion times.

Metaps has supported app monetization for developers through the formation of their 8 offices worldwide.

Intended use of Series C funding

1) Expand implementation of artificial intelligence technology

Metaps will continue to advance automation and increase efficiencies across all types of businesses utilizing “big data” accumulated over time. This will be accomplished with data analysis, pattern recognition, future forecasting and by improving the accuracy of automated processes by the Metaps’ AI system. For these purposes, funding will be used towards aggressive hiring of experts in the field, and investing in necessary research.

As indicated in the corporate vision of Metaps: “Through big data and computer learning, our aim is to be the world's brain by empowering people to make smarter decisions”, Metaps will go beyond smartphones and make the capabilities of the metaps Platform accessible to developers for all smart devices. Metaps will plan product expansion with the goal of increasing the platform infrastructure to reach 10% of the world’s population (800 million people) by 2016.

2) Expand financial services operations

Metaps is currently expanding the scale and operations of their new business, zero commission online payment service “SPIKE”. Over 50,000 accounts have been registered, and SPIKE use is increasing rapidly amongst individual and small e-commerce businesses. With a mission to “Change the rules of money with technology”, SPIKE will strive to become an all-encompassing financial service and not limit itself to online payments.