Randeft

Randeft is a BtoB SaaS startup company born to serve materials scientists seeking better materials to build a sustainable future. We are making a unique product that no one has heard of to meet solid but unsatisfied needs of materials scientists.

We’ve raised ¥70 million to take us to launch

We closed a ¥70 million seed round from Incubate Fund in October 2021 (press release in Japanese). We’ll use this funding to help launch a closed-test version of our software.

Concurrently, we’re having conversations already with about 10 domestic enterprise companies interested in our product. Currently CEO is the only full-time member and other part-time members are six web developers, one UX designer, two materials scientists, and two Biz Dev members. There are some full-time junior developer candidates in the final phase of the hiring process as well and all of them are foreign nationals living in Japan.

Help make us international from the beginning

For the moment we use Japanese as all members are Japanese. But we want to make our team international as soon as possible. The CEO and some of our part-time developers (including a tech lead) are English speakers. To communicate with other members in English, probably text message is preferable. We’ll gradually incorporate English into communication among developers once we have a developer who needs it (maybe you). Anyhow we will try our best to fix any language issues.

As we’re already set up to work remotely, we’re happy to consider candidates who aren’t based in Japan but would like to relocate here. We’re still figuring out exactly how this would work, but we’re thinking we’d initially hire you as a remote contractor in your own country until you can secure a visa. This is a new thing for us, so we won’t be sure of the exact conditions until we try it out.

Materials are everywhere

When you hear the word “materials”, you might find it difficult to relate the word with your daily life. But actually materials are literally everywhere. Everything essential to our modern society, including cars, houses, laptop computers, and smartphones, heavily relies on the fruits of enormous efforts by materials scientists.

One good example is lithium-ion batteries. Research to use lithium ions for batteries started in the 70’s and it took more than twenty years until the first commercial product launched. Without such continuous efforts made by researchers, we could not enjoy the benefits of mobile devices penetrated in our daily life.

99% of materials scientists have issues related to data handling

Materials science is an umbrella term for diverse kinds of research categories such as metal, glass, rubber, plastic, magnets, batteries, or any other functional materials with unfamiliar names. It’s so diverse that you sometimes hardly find anything in common between two categories other than that they are solid (say, metal and rubber or glass and plastic). This intrinsic diversity is amplified as research proceeds in terms of data types and formats.

On the other hand, like in many business areas, data-driven approaches using machine learning techniques are emerging in the world of science as well and materials science is not an exception. Such approaches require input data to be as neat as possible, which is far from what materials scientists see on their lab notebooks, laptop computers, or lab’s shared file servers. According to our survey, 99% of materials scientists have issues related to data handling (yes, 99%). We fix this situation to revive abandoned data, and help materials scientists find and share research data smoothly.

Data management in materials science has been ignored

Data management has been a headache for many scientific fields for a long time. Some fields with large populations or generous funding have received external support from software providers but materials science have not.

Now, with the rise of data-driven science, the benefit of better data management infrastructure is bigger than ever and scientists are seeking for a solution. We hear their voices that have never been heard.

What We Can Offer

1. New channel to contribute to the development in science and technology
2. Exciting experience to create a new BtoB SaaS market
3. Direct conversation with users having strong needs
4. Joy of engineering as a reward for solving user needs that have been overlooked.
5. Gradual engagement process to see the compatibility
6. Chance to build developer team and culture from scratch
7. Psychologically safe work environment (both remote and office)
8. Modern tech stack
9. Remote work (or onsite, if you want)
10. Flextime (core hours 11AM to 3PM JST)
11. Family friendly company culture
12. Visa support (if necessary)