News

JIC Venture Growth Investments, Inc. (VGI) has acquired shares in Canly Inc. (Canly), a leading provider of digital solutions for the store industry in Japan, through its JIC Venture Growth Fund 2.

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Canly’s core SaaS platform, Canly Store Marketing, is used by more than 110,000 stores for centralized information management, helping them enhance customer acquisition and engagement.

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As new lifestyles take hold—with the rise of e-commerce and omni-channel retail—store operators are finding that traditional mass and local marketing methods such as TV commercials, newspapers, flyers, and outdoor advertising are no longer sufficient. Instead, they increasingly need to leverage digital tools such as websites and apps to attract customers. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift from paid advertising to owned media strategies, prompting more businesses to manage multiple channels in-house, including Google Maps, social media, websites, and apps. However, maintaining and updating such a broad range of media, while also responding to customer reviews, requires significant time and resources.

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To address these challenges, Canly provides a marketing automation tool that supports customer acquisition and digital marketing operations for stores, enabling more effective marketing strategies aligned with evolving consumer behavior.

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Through this investment, VGI will support Canly’s product development and business expansion, helping to address structural challenges in the retail sector, such as chronic labor shortages, rising costs, and increasingly diverse consumer needs.

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