Invested in Eltes Co., Ltd.

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. (Minato-ku Tokyo, President & CEO: Kazuhiro Yoshizawa) today announced its investment in Eltes Co., Ltd. (“Eltes,” Minato-ku Tokyo, Representative Director: Takahiro Sugawara), provider of the service to prevent and deal with libel and slander on the web and social media sites.

1.Overview of the investment

Through the investment fund operated by the company, NTT DOCOMO Ventures acquired shares of Eltes issued through third party allocation.

2.Background

The web and social media have widely penetrated society. As a result, enterprises are operating in an environment in which information that could potentially have a significant effect on their reputation is distributed and spread swiftly on the web. This leaves open the possibility of the information ending up affecting the enterprises either positively or negatively. Thus, it has now become increasingly necessary for each company to manage its own reputation by monitoring the state of its reputation and brand image. In the U.S., the online reputation management (ORM) service has already come to attract great attention from companies, suggesting that, going forward, this service may potentially begin to draw increasingly strong attention from companies in Japan as well.
The “Eltes Cloud” service delivered by Eltes is the first cloud-based service of its kind in Japan that allows the user company to detect, in a burden-free manner, an emergency involving the occurrence of a website containing negative information on the company. Moreover, this service provides the user company with post-emergency solutions in a comprehensive manner. By leveraging its knowhow and databases in the web risk area accumulated over the years, Eltes is now able to deliver a high-precision emergency detection function service. In the future, the firm is expected to grow further to potentially serve the global market as well, in addition to the Japanese domestic market. NTT DOCOMO Ventures has made this investment decision looking forward to further growth in the business of Eltes.