Sansan partners Neo to support its expansion plans after receiving more funding

Cloud-based contact management solution provider Sansan has appointed global performance marketing agency network Neo as its agency. Neo, which is part of Mindshare and GroupM, will handle media investment, planning, and management for Sansan and its portfolio of products.This comes after the recent round of investment by Japan Post Capital, T. Rowe Price, SBI Investment, and DCM Ventures bringing Sansan’s total funding to over US$100 million. Sansan is now looking to expand globally with Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia as their focus markets.The Tokyo-based startup boasts an overwhelming 82% market share in Japan. The company launched its namesake B2B product, Sansan, in Singapore in 2015 and its B2C service, Eight, in India in 2017. Meanwhile, Neo taps on a global network of 116 offices in 86 countries.Sansan's senior marketing manager Krishna Agarwal said, “Neo somewhat resembles a start-up agency with GroupM wings. Its ability to move with the quickness of a start-up, yet with stable and reliable operations and support of a large network agency, is a major plus.”Sansan’s products digitise contact data with superb accuracy enabled by proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) enhanced by AI and human input. To date, Sansan’s flagship B2B system is at work in over 6,000 companies, including Lenovo Group Ltd, Merck & Co, and Seven & i Holdings Co.“In this new economy world, growing and matured start-ups seek unconventional thinking and solutions to effectively scale in an important growth period. Our understanding of audience, tools, and thought-provoking ideas for this blue ocean market gives us an edge in forming this partnership,” said Animesh Kumar, CEO of Neo Singapore.