4448.T

• Company & Business Overview

  • kubell was founded as a student startup in 2000, launched Chatwork in 2011, went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2019, and had over 700 group employees as of the end of December 2025. Its corporate mission is "Make work more enjoyable and creative", and its vision is "Bring a step-forward working style to everyone".
  • After the go-public growth phase, the company entered a new phase starting in 2023 focused on developing BPaaS as a new core business, completed the acquisition of Minajin Co., Ltd. (a HR/labor BPO provider) to establish a foothold in the BPaaS field, and built up BPO operation capabilities.

• Market Rationale for BPaaS Development

  • 70% of Japan's labor force works in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and the labor productivity of SMEs is only 1/3 that of large enterprises, which is the root cause of Japan's overall low productivity. The main barrier to SME digital transformation (DX) is not lack of money, but lack of IT talent to utilize existing SaaS tools, and traditional large-scale custom BPO is unaffordable for most SMEs, leaving this large market underserved.
  • The total addressable market (TAM) for Chatwork and BPaaS targeting SMEs, including the existing BPO market, is approximately 49 trillion yen, which is a huge untapped "blue ocean" market.

• Chatwork Competitive Advantages

  • Chatwork is the top business chat tool in Japan for active users, with a compound growth model driven by word-of-mouth: it has a simple, intuitive UI suitable for non-IT skilled users, seamless one-ID connectivity inside and outside the company that outperforms competitors like Slack and Teams, and is especially popular with SMEs and professionals (tax accountants, lawyers) who need to connect with multiple external clients, leading to organic viral growth without paid agency sales.
  • The overall business chat penetration in Japan is only 23.7%, so there is still huge room for growth, and ARPU continues to steadily increase through regular price adjustments paired with feature improvements.

• AI Agent Era Strategy

  • The "SaaS is Dead" narrative does not apply to Chatwork: direct communication between people still has core value that AI cannot replace. Instead, Chatwork will become an execution platform for AI agents, allowing users to run AI agent services directly from the Chatwork chat interface.
  • AI agents will greatly accelerate BPaaS development: the combination of human operators and AI can greatly improve operator productivity, expanding the number of clients per operator from 10 to 20, 50 or even 100, and the company is currently developing AI features such as personalized text generation, message summarization for Chatwork, and AI agents for internal BPaaS operations.

• FY25 Operational Review

  • The development system was greatly strengthened, enabling continuous addition of new features to Chatwork. BPaaS business was successfully launched and grew much faster than expected. The main remaining challenge is that BPaaS profit margin is still low at this stage, as the company is currently prioritizing volume growth over profit, and the focus for the current fiscal year will be on improving profitability. Cross-synergy between Chatwork and BPaaS customer bases will also be strengthened going forward.

• Medium-term target (by 2026): Become the No.1 BPaaS company for SMEs, with total revenue target of 15 billion yen, compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30% or higher, EBITDA target of 1.5 billion yen to 2.25 billion yen, including M&A to achieve growth.
• Medium to long-term financial target: Expand EBITDA margin from the current 25% to 40%, and achieve an operating profit margin of 15% to 30%.
• The three core strategies to achieve these targets are: 1) Communication platform strategy to evolve Chatwork from a simple chat tool to a comprehensive platform; 2) BPaaS strategy to deliver substantive DX for SMEs by acting as an agent for SaaS and AI operation; 3) Incubation strategy to continuously develop new businesses in adjacent areas such as finance, education, human resources, and data solutions.
• The full-year FY25 consolidated revenue forecast was for 13%+ year-over-year growth with EBITDA of 1.5 billion yen. The initial FY25 forecast was revised downward slightly due to BPaaS delivery delays, but the revised forecast was achieved: revenue hit 100% of target, and profit substantially exceeded forecast.

1. SaaS Segment (led by Chatwork): Accounts for 90% of total company revenue. As of the end of FY25, total company-wide ARR is 9.55 billion yen, with SaaS segment ARR exceeding 8 billion yen. Chatwork has over 973,000 introduced companies, 8.06 million registered IDs, 830,000 paid IDs, an ARPU of 730 yen, and a very low churn rate of 0.21%. 2. BPaaS Segment (led by Takushita): In FY25, BPaaS revenue exceeded 1 billion yen, with ARR converted to over 1.4 billion yen, achieving 80% year-over-year revenue growth (1.8x the previous year's size), becoming the company's second core business alongside Chatwork.

• BPaaS is a fundamentally different labor-intensive business compared to the original asset-light SaaS business, requiring large-scale recruitment of operators and completely different HR, training, and corporate system designs, bringing organizational transformation challenges.
• The original time-based pricing model for BPaaS creates a misalignment: when AI improves productivity, working hours decrease which reduces revenue, creating a structural drag on profitability that the company is still in the process of addressing.
• Full automation of all business processes by AI agents will take a long time to achieve, similar to the gradual rollout of autonomous driving, and AI tools remain difficult for non-IT skilled SME users to operate independently for the foreseeable future.

Q: What is the intention and background of launching the BPaaS strategy?

A: After launching Chatwork, the company tried to expand multiple adjacent SaaS products on top of the Chatwork platform, but found that the biggest barrier for SMEs was that they did not have in-house IT talent to use even good SaaS tools. This led to the idea of providing SaaS operation agency through Chatwork, which is BPaaS, to help SMEs achieve DX through outsourcing-style services, which matches current market demand for end-to-end productivity improvement rather than just software.

Q: How does kubell view the current trend of AI agents and the "SaaS is Dead" narrative, and how does this align with BPaaS?

A: AI agents can now execute end-to-end tasks autonomously, but full automation of all business processes will take time to achieve, similar to the gradual rollout of autonomous driving. Some domains will see rapid DX progress powered by AI and SaaS, but others will still require a hybrid approach combining human and AI work. This hybrid model is exactly what BPaaS provides, and the faster-than-expected progress of AI development confirms that the BPaaS concept is correct.

Q: Will Chatwork increase ARPU through large price increases or feature updates in the future?

A: The company regularly adds new features and improves product value, and regularly adjusts prices to reflect the increased value. ARPU has been and will continue to increase steadily rather than jumping sharply, which can be seen in the historical trend of ARPU growth.

Q: What are the competitive advantages of Chatwork compared to major competitors like Slack and Teams?

A: Competitors are mostly positioned for IT-skilled users at tech startups or large enterprise clients. kubell is specifically positioned for non-IT skilled users and SMEs, with a much simpler UI, and a unique advantage in seamless external connection that fits how SMEs work with multiple external partners. This has led to organic viral growth especially through professional professionals like tax accountants and lawyers who recommend it to their clients, with no formal agency contracts needed.

Q: How will kubell balance the SaaS and BPaaS businesses, which have very different business models?

A: SaaS is asset-light with mostly engineering staff, while BPaaS is labor-intensive requiring hundreds of operators. To adapt to this difference, the company established a fully-owned subsidiary kubell Partner to hold all BPaaS operator staff, with completely separate system design from the original SaaS business. The company has learned from acquired BPaaS player Minajin, and has successfully grown BPaaS to 1 billion yen in revenue in 2 years, and remains fully committed to expanding this business.

Q: What is the pricing strategy for the core BPaaS service Takushita, especially regarding the mismatch between productivity improvement and revenue under the current time-based model?

A: The company recognizes this structural issue with time-based pricing, but initially adopted it because it is easy to quote and helps with customer acquisition. Now that the business has reached 1 billion yen in scale and standard service packages have emerged, the company is shifting to value-based (outcome-based) packaged pricing, such as a 300 thousand yen to 500 thousand yen per month "full accounting outsourcing package", where revenue is fixed regardless of operator working hours. This means that AI-driven productivity improvements directly increase profit margins, and allow each operator to serve more clients, growing total revenue. Currently, around 30% of new orders already use value-based pricing, and this share will continue to increase.