NYC’s betaworks has taken $10 million in additional investment from Japanese digital media incubator and Twitter investor Digital Garage, which is tagged on to the $20 million round the company received in December.
According to betaworks founder John Borthwick, Digital Garage is very similar to betaworks. “They’re a builder and an investor,” said Borthwick. “They’ve been operating for a long time in the Japanese market as well as other Asian and U.S. markets.”
The partnership is meant to help Japanese startups expand into the U.S.
The WSJ reports that $7.5 million of the $10 million investment is coming from Digital Garage, with the remaining $2.5 million coming from other angel investors, such as Adrian Aoun and Blake Krikorian.
Borthwick said that after the $20 million round in December, the first time betaworks has raised money in four years, the firm received additional outreach from other investors who wished to be more involved with betaworks.
Digital Garage joins an impressive list of investors, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Ev Williams (Twitter), Abdur Chowdhury (Summize founder), Dave Morin (Path), and Gerry Laybourne, who recently joined the board at betaworks.
Betaworks is a startup factory of sorts, making seed-stage investments in existing companies (such as Airbnb and Kickstarter), as well as launching and creating new products, such as Digg, Dots, Chartbeat, Bitly, Poncho, Telecast and, most recently, crowdfunding-based equity platform Alphaworks.
