Rakuten Mobile is to buy South Korea's Estmob with its Send Anywhere service to boost Symphony platform.

Anne Morris, Contributing Editor, Light Reading

October 25, 2021

3 Min Read
Rakuten orchestrates Korean deal for Symphony

Rakuten Mobile plans to add a string to the bow of its Symphony venture with the acquisition of yet another technology specialist that will also furnish it with a research and development presence in South Korea.

The Japanese mobile operator announced it has agreed to acquire Estmob, the South Korean startup that is behind the peer-to-peer file transfer solution Send Anywhere. The ultimate aim is to integrate Send Anywhere with Rakuten Symphony.

Notably, Rakuten investment arm Rakuten Capital has been supporting Estmob via early stage investment fund Rakuten Ventures since 2014, when it led a $1 million seed round for the Seoul-based startup. In 2016, Rakuten Ventures fully provided Series A funding of $6 million.

Figure 1: Send Anywhere is a peer-to-peer file-sharing app, developed by a Rakuten-backed startup called Estmob. (Source: Postmodern Studio / Alamy Stock Photo) Send Anywhere is a peer-to-peer file-sharing app, developed by a Rakuten-backed startup called Estmob.
(Source: Postmodern Studio / Alamy Stock Photo)

Estmob was launched in 2012 as a spin-off from Korean company Estsoft. Its aim was to tackle the problem of how to most efficiently send files between two devices. That in turn led to the development of Send Anywhere, said to have more than 43 million users in locations such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom.

In 2019, Estmob launched a cloud service, Sendy, that has evolved into a collaborative tool by adding cloud functions to Send Anywhere. Sendy is currently used mainly in Japan, Korea and the United States.

Platform building

Tareq Amin, CTO of Rakuten Mobile and CEO of Rakuten Symphony, said the Estmob team will help to develop platform products "for our mobile operator customers around the world."

Indeed, Rakuten launched Symphony in August 2021 to manage Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), the portfolio of technologies it uses in Japan and is now pitching to other service providers. Besides Rakuten's own software and services (Altiostar, Innoeye, plus automation and orchestration tools developed internally), RCP includes partner products.

Want to know more about the cloud? Check out our dedicated cloud-native networks and NFV content channel here on Light Reading.

German operator 1&1 has so far signed up for RCP in order to build a virtualized mobile network based on open radio network access (RAN) technology.

Rakuten Group has also since announced it will make its Symphony effort "a business organization of the company," a move the company said will allow it to "start considering a capital and business alliance."

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— Anne Morris, contributing editor, special to Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Anne Morris

Contributing Editor, Light Reading

Anne Morris is a freelance journalist, editor and translator. She has been working in the telecommunications sector since 1996, when she joined the London-based team of Communications Week International as copy editor. Over the years she held the editor position at Total Telecom Online and Total Tele-com Magazine, eventually leaving to go freelance in 2010. Now living in France, she writes for a number of titles and also provides research work for analyst companies.

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