Following CEO Shake-Up, Mixi Ploughs Seed Funding into Two Startup

Japan’s Facebook-like site Mixi has been struggling for a couple of years with stagnant user numbers and an apparent lack of direction. Last week, in a major shake-up, Mixi’s founder left the CEO role to hand over the position to Yusuke Asakura. Today Mixi announced that it has put seed funding into two promising mobile-first startups.

Mixi has ploughed over $700,000 into CloudStudy, whose main product is StudyPlus, a social learning management platform. The other investment, explains the Startup-Dating blog, is in Reventive, a young company that has so far made three social apps. It hasn’t been revealed how much Reventive got.

StudyPlus

CloudStudy’s StudyPlus platform helps students to record their study times, subjects, and content. Students can then share this progress with contacts inside the app, or to social networks like Facebook (yes, Mixi’s main rival).

After starting up in March 2012, it has now grown to 100,000 registered users, though CloudStudy’s CEo concedes that only about 12,000 of those learners are active on the service. But those who are active do post a lot each day. It’s accessible in a web app as well as on apps for Android and iOS.

Reventive

Reventive’s main product is a Path clone called Close (see the GIF demo), which is on Android and iOS. Whereas Path lets you have over 100 buddies within the app, Close lives up to its name by restricting you to just nine close friends. So perhaps it’s somewhere between Path and so-called couples’ apps like Between.

The same startup is also working on a location-based group dating/hangout app called Gocon which is still in the works.

Mixi mixing it up

While Mixi hasn’t acquired the startups, that might happen later if one really takes off. A few months ago,Mixi acquired the startup company Kamado, which makes a host of sites and apps.

But Mixi has also shut down a lot of things that don’t work. Its subscription fashion e-commerce service Petite Jeté was launched last September, but it was killed off by January of this year.

Mixi has been hovering – a polite way of saying horribly stuck – at about 15 million active users for two whole years while Facebook has grown strongly in the same time period. Also, social media trends have moved towards social messaging apps like Line. Line now has 150 million global users, with about 45 million of those based in Japan.