astamuse Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Ayumu Nagai) and  academist, Inc. (Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Ryosuke Shibato) have agreed to form business partnership which focuses on providing support to   promising research and development activities by optimizing expense acquisition activities and help the conversion of each R&D activities into real business opportunities.

astamuse owns one of the world’s largest innovation databases containing information on R&D expenditures in 80 countries around the world, and provides support to formulate corporate future plans, new business development, R&D consulting, and recruitment support. Since 2014, academist has been operating Japan’s first research-specific crowdfunding site, “academist,” and has helped many researchers to disseminate information to the larger public and help them raise research and development expenses.

Through this business partnership, the two companies aim to optimize the acquisition activities of R&D funds by jointly utilizing the two companies’ databases, providing researchers who look to acquire new R&D funds with a clear understanding of global R&D trends and providing proposals on where to acquire such funds, as well as providing support in matching opportunities with companies. For companies looking for research seed money, both companies will provide the latest research information that will be useful for the research and development of existing businesses and the creation of new businesses.

As research activities has become more complex and deepened due to the fragmentation of academic disciplines, it is difficult to find the right research themes that could lead to useful science and technology in the future. For this reason, it is very important to properly analyze, and disseminate research themes to the public from a long-term perspective with specialized knowledge, and to support and produce them. Through this partnership, the two companies will work to accelerate the circulation of research funds by optimizing opportunities for researchers to obtain research funds, so that more research and development can become actual technologies that are widely useful to society.

About the academist, Inc.

With the mission of “Researchers exist, we connect” academist is developing a project to connect researchers with people who support them and people who need the power of researchers. It mainly operates academic crowdfunding services “academist” and academic media “academist Journal”. academist is Japan’s first crowdfunding service dedicated to acquiring research funding. Since its release in April 2014, about 140 researchers have tried crowdfunding projects and successfully obtained a total of about 120 million yen in research funding.