On September 6, 2022, Tailor Inc., a provider of development infrastructure for business systems, announced that it has raised approximately 570 million yen ($4M) in a seed round from Y Combinator and others.

Tailor is a startup co-founded by serial entrepreneur Yo Shibata and Mitsunori Takahashi, who was in charge of Mercari R4D, Mercari's R&D organization. Both were co-founders of Spotlight Inc. (now Rakuten Payments), a location-data startup that was founded in 2011 and sold to Rakuten in 2013, and they have partnered together again to take on this challenge.

Tailor provides large companies with the Tailor Platform, a platform that enables the development of business software tailor-made for each individual company 10 times faster. With the mission of "Empower every company to deploy any idea," Tailor aims to create a world where anyone can participate in product development by simplifying the difficult parts of product development that require expertise.

Taylor is the first Japan-based company to be selected by Y Combinator, the world's leading accelerator founded in 2005 in Silicon Valley, USA. In the past, Y Combinator has produced high-profile global services such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Coinbase, as well as technology companies for developers such as Stripe, GitLab, Apollo, Docker, and Retool.

Taylor has raised approximately 570 million yen in this seed round from Global Brain Corporation and Y Combinator. The funds raised were mainly used for the further development of the Tailor Platform and talent recruitment. The company describes the background and purpose of the fundraising as follows:

“The use of SaaS and other services is increasing in various processes within companies against the backdrop of corporate DX using digital technology and the digitization of business operations accelerated by Covid. Especially in large companies with more than 3,000 employees, it is necessary to strengthen customized systems that support their own complex and highly unique operations, as well as to manage numerous SaaS and other data spread across various departments in an integrated manner.
Therefore, Tailor supports the modernization of large companies' mission-critical systems by providing the "Tailor Platform," a development platform for enterprise customers that enables the development of tailor-made mission-critical systems 10 times faster than ever before. The "Tailor Platform" provides common back-end functions shared by various business systems as APIs, enabling companies to develop only those parts of the functions they require that require individual customization and to focus their limited engineering resources on only those parts that are truly necessary. Furthermore, we aim to create a world where the mechanisms behind the system are transparent, and non-engineers can participate in the development of products with an understanding of the system's structure. We plan to use the funds raised to strengthen the "Tailor Platform" and to strengthen our organizational capabilities, including recruitment."

Tailor’s company profile is here:
https://protocol.ooo/en/companies/tailor