News

JIC Venture Growth Investments (VGI) has acquired the shares in User Like, Inc. (User Like), a company providing a flower subscription service, through its JIC Venture Growth Fund 1 (VGF1).

User Like is a company which provides flower subscription service, “bloomee”. It started a flower subscription service for the first time in Japan in 2016. It uncovered potential needs of people who has no custom to decorate flowers. As a result, it has grown up to Japan's largest player, which has over 100,000 households’ customers and 12 million cumulative flowers shipped. Now its business model has already established and has been accelerating towardspursuit of operational excellence and customer expansion.

VGI promotes solving productivity issues brought about by the distribution structure among farmers, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers in the flower industry. By building direct relationships with stakeholders from upstream to downstream related to distribution from flower production to sales, User Like can reduce flower production loss, speed up production cycles, stabilize florists to secure a good source of income, pursue quality, and form appropriate prices, etc., We aim to promote SDGs efforts and improve the distribution structure by co-creation with stakeholders.

VGI will support User Like’s promoting digital transformation of the distribution structure of the flower industry, which will lead to the creation of a new market for the flower industry in Japan and the realization of a sustainable industrial structure.

^{The information contained in this notice is current at the time of publication and subject to change without notice.}