LAPRAS
LAPRAS Inc. is a Tokyo-based HR tech company operating an AI-driven reverse-recruitment platform for Japanese IT engineers, using aggregated public technical output to score market value, match candidates, and enable direct company scouting and self-serve job board listings.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2016
- HeadquartersTokyo, Japan
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B and B2C
- OfferingSoftware
What LAPRAS does
LAPRAS Inc. is a Tokyo-based Japanese HR tech company that operates an AI-driven reverse-recruitment marketplace targeting IT engineers. The platform automatically aggregates a registered engineer's public activity across GitHub, Qiita, note, Zenn, connpass, Speaker Deck, Doorkeeper, teratail, and X (Twitter) to construct a continuously updated profile, then applies a proprietary four-axis Technical Skill Score and a Market Value Score benchmarked against the company's ~36,000 registered users and current engineer job postings. An LLM-based AI Article Review generates qualitative feedback on user blog content, and a recommendation engine routes inbound scout notifications from interested companies. LAPRAS monetizes the corporate side through a subscription scout service via scout.lapras.com and a transaction-based LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN for direct company-to-candidate matching, with the engineer side offered free of charge to maximize top-of-funnel supply.
The platform is supported by media properties (LAPRAS NOTE, LAPRAS AI LAB, LAPRAS Engineer Talk) and an annual Output Award that reinforces brand within the Japanese engineering community. In August 2024 LAPRAS entered a strategic partnership with South Korea's Wanted Lab — Wanted Lab's first overseas investment — combining a stake with a technology-transfer agreement that brought Wanted Lab's AI recruitment know-how into LAPRAS and seeded the launch of the LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN. A ~400M yen funding round followed in September 2024 (Wanted JAPAN equity plus Resona Bank and Japan Finance Corporation debt), bringing cumulative funding to ~1.2B yen and earmarking capital for entry into the South Korean IT engineer recruitment market to address Japan's engineer shortage via cross-border remote work and relocation. The company is led by founders Hiroki Shimada (CEO), Yudai Nii (COO), and Katsutoshi Ito (CTO), with Sho Endo promoted to a newly created CRO role in November 2025.
LAPRAS is a private, venture-backed company headquartered in Tokyo with 11-50 employees, no public financial disclosures, and an undisclosed revenue base. Its go-to-market is a hybrid product-led / sales-led motion: a freemium engineer signup funnel feeds a corporate marketplace monetized through sales-assisted scouting and self-serve job board listings. Named enterprise customers visible on the homepage include SmartHR, WealthNavi, Asahi Shimbun, LINE Digital Frontier, Kauche, and Asuene, with listed salaries in the 10M-15.4M JPY/year range. The core product is differentiated by its proprietary scoring rubric and data flywheel, but the company faces the typical risks of a small, Japan-focused, single-product marketplace scaling against larger HR-tech incumbents.
LAPRAS firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- LAPRAS
- Legal name
- LAPRAS Inc.
- Website
- https://lapras.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2016
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- LAPRAS Inc. is a Tokyo-based HR tech company operating an AI-driven reverse-recruitment platform for Japanese IT engineers, using aggregated public technical output to score market value, match candidates, and enable direct company scouting and self-serve job board listings.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
LAPRAS industry classification
Industry- Product category
- AI Recruitment Platform
- NAICS
- Employment Placement Agencies (561311)
- SIC
- Services-Employment Agencies (7361)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Skills Assessment & Talent/Employability Testing Platforms (EDAFADAM)
Keywords
Where LAPRAS is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Tokyo
- HQ country
- Japan
- HQ region
- Asia
Offices1 record
Markets served
LAPRAS business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B and B2C
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Technology or R&D, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Infrastructure
Revenue model
- Freemium engineer platform: LAPRAS is offered free of charge to individual engineer users, who can register and use profile, scoring, and scout-receiving features at no cost. The free user base (~36,000 registered engineers) generates the profile and activity data that powers the product and creates demand on the corporate side.
- Corporate Scout / Recruiter Service (scout.lapras.com): Recurring/subscription revenue from companies and recruiters who pay to identify, view, and approach engineers via LAPRAS's AI-scored talent pool through the dedicated scout portal, replacing traditional headhunting with a platform-based model.
- LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN: Direct matching listing/jobs board that supports direct matching between companies and job seekers, explicitly designed to reduce recruitment costs and shift from traditional headhunting to a platform model.
- Cross-border IT engineer recruitment (Japan ↔ South Korea): Revenue from matching South Korean IT engineers to Japanese companies via cross-border remote work and relocation, jointly developed with Wanted Lab, addressing Japan's IT engineer shortage.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Engineer-side free signup with full access to profile, scoring, article review, and scout receipt. |
| Other | Multi-year contract | Corporate scout / hiring-side service via scout.lapras.com — pricing not publicly disclosed. |
| Transaction based/ take rate | Pay-as-you-go | LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN — direct company-to-candidate job board. |
Go-to-market motion4 records
LAPRAS product offering
Product offeringCore offering
LAPRAS operates an AI-driven engineer profile aggregation, scoring, and reverse-recruitment platform. For individual IT engineers, LAPRAS automatically collects public online activity across GitHub, X (Twitter), Qiita, note, Zenn, connpass, Speaker Deck, Doorkeeper, and teratail, then computes a proprietary Market Value Score, a four-axis Technical Skill Score, an LLM-based AI Article Review, and an AI-generated Career Market Value Report, all free of charge. For corporate customers, the platform surfaces pre-scored engineer profiles via a dedicated scout.lapras.com recruiter portal, direct scout/interest notifications, and the LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN that supports direct company-to-candidate matching, materially reducing recruitment cost relative to traditional Japanese headhunting.
Product overview
LAPRAS operates as a single integrated platform-plus-modules product for the Japanese IT-engineer recruiting market, anchored on the LAPRAS core AI scout service at lapras.com and extended by the LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN direct-matching job board (introduced August 2024 alongside WantedLab's investment) and a separate recruiter-facing portal at scout.lapras.com. The core platform bundles four tightly coupled modules — the Market Value Score (with AI-generated Career Market Value Report and salary comparison graph), the Technical Skill Score (built from GitHub activity, technical articles, tech events, and skill tags), an LLM-based AI Article Review, and Scout from Companies (interest notifications plus footprint analytics). Around this core product sit three media properties — LAPRAS NOTE, LAPRAS AI LAB, and the LAPRAS Engineer Talk video program — which act as content and recruiting-marketing surfaces rather than transactional modules of the platform.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN: A direct-matching recruitment platform plan that supports direct matching between companies and IT engineer job seekers, significantly reducing recruitment costs and displacing traditional headhunting models.
Products and services
- LAPRAS (core AI scout service) AI-driven scout and self-market-value service for individual IT engineers in Japan. LAPRAS auto-collects public activity across multiple SNS/dev platforms, generates an up-to-date profile, scores the user's market value and technical skill, and surfaces direct scout approaches from interested companies. Offered free of charge to engineers; monetized on the corporate side.
- LAPRAS Scout (recruiter portal) Separate landing area for hiring managers and corporate recruiting teams to identify, view, and send scouts and interest notifications to candidates in the LAPRAS talent pool, linked from the LAPRAS homepage as the recruiter-side entry point.
- LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN Self-serve direct-matching job board between companies and IT engineer job seekers, designed to significantly reduce recruiting costs and displace traditional headhunting models.
- Market Value Score with AI Career Market Value Report and Salary Comparison Quantifies a user's current market value as a score derived from work history, technologies, years of experience, and benchmarks against the LAPRAS user base and current job postings, packaged as an AI-generated Career Market Value Report and a salary comparison graph by engineer experience year.
- Technical Skill Score Statistically scores a user's technical skill from public internet output across four axes: GitHub activity, technical articles, technical event participation, and skill tags, including an Activity Log and a Tag cloud summarizing the user's strengths.
- AI Article Review (LLM-based article scoring) Uses an LLM to inspect the content of a user's blog articles, score them with a LAPRAS-unique evaluation rubric, and return objective evaluation comments and improvement recommendations.
- Scout from Companies (Direct Scout and Interest Notification) Delivers direct scout and side-job inquiries from companies based on a user's full profile, including interest notifications and a "footprint" analytics view that lists companies that have viewed the user's portfolio.
- Cross-Border Japan-Korea IT Engineer Recruitment Service Professional service that matches South Korean IT engineers to Japanese companies through cross-border remote work and relocation, operated in partnership with Wanted Lab / Wanted JAPAN to address Japan's IT engineer shortage.
Companies that use LAPRAS
Customer profileNamed customers6 records
Ideal customer profiles2 records
LAPRAS technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration10 records
AI capability8 records
Feature6 records
LAPRAS partnerships and signals
Strategic signalScale indicators7 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights6 records
LAPRAS competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Wantedly: Japan's leading 'reverse recruitment' platform for engineers and creatives, offering company profiles, scout messages, and a job board. Directly comparable to LAPRAS's core model, with a substantially larger user base, stronger brand, and broader category coverage.
- Forkwell: Japan-focused engineer career platform with skill tagging, portfolio profiles, and company matching. Competes head-to-head with LAPRAS for the same Japanese IT engineer audience and runs a similar freemium-to-recruiter monetization.
- Findy: Japanese engineer-matching service that scores developers based on GitHub activity and operates a freelance-matching platform. Closest technical analog to LAPRAS in terms of GitHub-derived scoring and IT engineer niche.
- Green (Green Japan): Japanese job board and matching platform focused specifically on IT engineers, with company reviews and direct application flow. Overlaps with LAPRAS's job-board offering for the same engineer audience.
- paiza: Japanese engineer-focused recruitment and learning platform with skill-based matching, similar in audience and PLG-style skill challenges to LAPRAS's scoring approach.
Broad incumbents
- BizReach: Japan's largest premium headhunting/recruitment platform serving mid-career professionals including engineers. Operates at much larger scale and is a broader incumbent overlapping with LAPRAS's corporate-recruiter demand side.
- LinkedIn (Talent Solutions): Global professional network with recruiter tools, profile-based scoring (LinkedIn Skill Assessments), and InMail scouting. Represents the broad-incumbent benchmark for AI-driven talent matching at massive scale.
- Recruit Holdings (Indeed, etc.): Parent of Indeed, LinkedIn, and other recruitment brands; operates massive job-board and matching businesses globally. A dominant incumbent in Japan that could choose to localize engineer-specific AI scoring features.
- Lever: Global ATS and talent sourcing platform; relevant adjacent incumbent for the corporate scout/recruiter workflow that LAPRAS sells through scout.lapras.com, though broader in scope and primarily serving enterprise HR teams.
Emerging players
- Wanted Lab: South Korean HR tech company that operates Wanted and is also LAPRAS's strategic investor and technology-transfer partner. Comparable product surface and a key bridge for LAPRAS's Korea expansion.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks7 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
LAPRAS social profiles
Digital presenceLAPRAS financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
LAPRAS leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles4 records
LAPRAS funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds8 records
Investors9 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
LAPRAS M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about LAPRAS
What does LAPRAS do?
LAPRAS operates an AI-driven engineer profile aggregation, scoring, and reverse-recruitment platform. For individual IT engineers, LAPRAS automatically collects public online activity across GitHub, X (Twitter), Qiita, note, Zenn, connpass, Speaker Deck, Doorkeeper, and teratail, then computes a proprietary Market Value Score, a four-axis Technical Skill Score, an LLM-based AI Article Review, and an AI-generated Career Market Value Report, all free of charge. For corporate customers, the platform surfaces pre-scored engineer profiles via a dedicated scout.lapras.com recruiter portal, direct scout/interest notifications, and the LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN that supports direct company-to-candidate matching, materially reducing recruitment cost relative to traditional Japanese headhunting.
Is LAPRAS a public or private company?
LAPRAS is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was LAPRAS founded?
LAPRAS was founded in 2016. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is LAPRAS based?
LAPRAS is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, in the Asia region.
How does LAPRAS make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Freemium engineer platform is the primary driver. The others are corporate Scout / Recruiter Service (scout.lapras.com), LAPRAS JOB BOARD PLAN and cross-border IT engineer recruitment (Japan ↔ South Korea).
Who are LAPRAS's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Wantedly, Forkwell, Findy, Green (Green Japan) and paiza. Broad incumbents are BizReach, LinkedIn (Talent Solutions), Recruit Holdings (Indeed, etc.) and Lever. Wanted Lab is listed as an emerging player.
Does LAPRAS have an API?
No public API is recorded for LAPRAS.
What industry is LAPRAS in?
LAPRAS's product category is AI Recruitment Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is EDAFADAM, Skills Assessment & Talent/Employability Testing Platforms. Its NAICS code is 561311 and its SIC code is 7361.