Bitrise announced its physical expansion into Japan. The Y Combinator company has secured more than 400 Japanese customers without a dedicated local presence.
This month it finalized its formation of Bitrise Japan and opened a satellite office in Japan. Bitrise’s new Osaka-based team will provide on-the-ground support to current and future Japanese customers, as well as build local awareness for Bitrise.
Bitrise works with more than 6,000 mobile companies around the world to automate the critical processes that stand between them and their ability to release mobile app updates frequently. These processes include everything from building and testing new app versions to understanding how new code affects apps before shipping to app stores.
The company attracted its first Japanese developers in 2014, following a feature on product discovery platform Product Hunt. That initial influx of interest among the Japanese mobile engineering community was quickly followed by early adoption by DeNA, one of Japan’s largest mobile and online services providers, and Pixiv, a social media platform for online creators.
Now, Bitrise’s Japanese client base includes some of Japan’s largest mobile organizations, including Rakuten, Eureka (Part of Match Group and one of the fastest growing online dating services in Japan), Fast Retailing (Owners of Uniqlo), Recruit (owners of Indeed and Glassdoor in Japan), PayPay (founded by Softbank and Yahoo! Japan), Recochoku (music apps), Hatena (creators of online communications and other apps), Timers (family photo albums), and Zaim (fintech app).
“Japan is an incredibly difficult market to get into, and we find ourselves in a unique position to have developed our client base through the community features we built into our product,” said Barnabas Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise.
“Within the same year we initially entered Japan , we had localized documentation created directly by Japanese developers who were very engaged in what we’re doing. This enabled us to expand within the local community in advance of having a physical presence. We are eager to further build our relationships, and expand our partner and developer network.”
Japan has been developing mobile apps longer than any other country in the world and is the only place where mobile developers have as many as 15 years of experience (compared to 10 years or less everywhere else). These developers have developed more sophisticated mobile processes and practices than anywhere else, giving them up to a 3-month headstart on any mobile initiative they’re involved in.
“By becoming closer to Bitrise users in Japan, we expect to be able to eliminate the time difference barrier, shorten support response time, and hold customized seminars for companies,” said Hisashi Iguchi, CI/CD Engineer at DeNA.
Bitrise’s Mobile DevOps platform lends to both product-led and community-led growth. The latter was responsible for organically growing its adoption among the Japanese developer community. The company has since worked with this community to localize all of its technical documentation, and now has more documentation in Japanese than in any other language.
Bitrise intends to continue growing its community through local users groups and events, and will expand its team with hires in Tokyo and other regions throughout Japan.
Bitrise works with clients throughout Asia, including Huawei in China, Traveloka in Indonesia, and Tigerspike in Singapore.
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