Belong builds an ecosystem for refurbished mobile devices, combining its own factory operations with software engineering to improve efficiency and quality. Founded out of Itochu in 2017, the company has expanded internationally with a New York office, and its diverse team works across mobile, e-commerce, IoT, and AI.
Being different is our strength
Founded as a result of an internal effort at Itochu, we’re not your typical startup. Our team members come from diverse backgrounds such as Japan, USA, Bangladesh, Sweden and Germany, and as we grow it, diversity is something we strive to increase, as having a wide variety of perspectives makes us stronger. Many of our members have an international background from all over the world, but we keep our business language to Japanese.
This variety in perspectives is what enabled us to see the possible solutions to the process optimization issues we’re currently employing to the refurbished used electronics industry, and our backgrounds helped us approach the issues with a wider range of not only tools but also a wider range of options of how to solve the issues.
We’re a stable startup, which fights with quality and process in mind, always aiming for creating a more efficient, qualitative product for which we’re already receiving high praises domestically and internationally.
This we’ve been doing successfully for five years and have just established ourselves in New York, USA - creating the need for an even more international and challenge driven team.
On top of that we’re also pushing the boundaries of our business by incorporating more and more AI trendy concepts such as LLM and Agents. We like to stay busy learning and adapting.
We got a factory
Unlike many other startups, we’ve got a factory that is the heart of our business model. There we receive electronics that are to be refurbished and released back onto the market. Optimizing the process for grading the devices, refurbishing, re-selling - all aspects improve our cost performance ratio enabling us to polish the units even more thus improving the quality of the end product. This is how we fight, in a market normally considered a red ocean and focused on driving prices down.
Our business is unique, and our approach to technology strengthens our case. Our CTO, Fukui Tatsuya, also says that it’s important for us to share our know-how with the rest of Japan who are trying to make something truly unique, providing concrete sustainable value to their end-users. For this effort, he’s been a present part of the startup and AI scene in Japan, always striving for others to achieve more by contributing his rare perspective.
In our Factory-centric approach, we’ve been working with several different products in various stages since the start, doing everything from smartphone app development, E-commerce to IoT. From 2023 we’re also incorporating areas such as AI & Machine Learning.
This we execute by having several dedicated agile teams which are working closely together with our operation and business teams with the aim of not only creating product value but also enabling our company to incorporate a firm engineering perspective to our business model.
Ample understanding for young parents
Many of us have children, and want to passionately pursue a fulfilling career - our workplace makes it easy to take care of sick children at home or manage topics at school or kindergarten
Stability
As a subsidiary of Itochu, with stable revenue points since founding, we’re stable to the extent where we haven’t had to compromise with bonus payments up to this point.