We’re pleased to announce that NEXTBLUE, Asia’s first fund dedicated to women’s wellbeing and female founders, has participated in the Series A funding round of iiba, Inc., a Tokyo-based parenting tech company reimagining how families with children discover, access, and receive support in their communities. The round — approximately ¥300 million — was led by Spiral Innovation Partners, with co-investors including Keio Corporation and Tokio Marine Holdings (via Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd.), alongside NEXTBLUE Fund II.
Why Parenting Infrastructure Is a Women’s Wellbeing Issue
At NEXTBLUE, we invest in the full arc of women’s lives — from reproductive health to career, caregiving, and beyond. Parenting, and the infrastructure (or lack thereof) that surrounds it, sits squarely within that thesis.
Japan faces one of the most acute demographic crises in the developed world. Its birth rate has fallen to historic lows, and the government has committed over ¥12 trillion annually to child-rearing support through the newly established Ministry of Children and Families. Yet despite this unprecedented public investment, a structural gap persists: an estimated ¥750 billion in annual benefits fails to reach the households that need it most. The resources exist. The delivery system does not.
This is not simply a logistics problem. It is a problem that disproportionately affects women — who continue to bear the primary cognitive and logistical burden of raising children in Japan, and who are most likely to reduce working hours, exit the workforce, or forgo career advancement due to inadequate parenting support. The visibility, accessibility, and quality of childcare infrastructure is, in this sense, a women’s economic empowerment issue.
A Platform Built on Trust, Community, and Rapid Growth
iiba was founded by CEO Nana Aizawa with a deceptively simple premise: give parents a reliable, localized source of truth for the places and services that matter most in raising a child — playgrounds, restaurants, extracurricular activities, and more. Since its official launch, the platform has grown to over 100,000 registered spots nationwide, driven almost entirely by organic word-of-mouth and user-generated content (UGC), without significant advertising spend.
The numbers from the past year (April 2025 vs April 2026) speak for themselves:
- Users: +400%
- Registered spots: +556%
- Revenue: +700%
What’s especially notable is how this growth happened. iiba has built a loyal community of parents who trust the platform precisely because it was built by and for them — a dynamic that creates powerful network effects and defensible data moats as the platform scales.
iiba’s ambition extends well beyond a map application. The company is planning a major product renewal that will evolve the platform from a place-discovery tool into a comprehensive life infrastructure for families — connecting discovery, action, and payment in a single, seamless experience. The strategic vision is what the team calls “vertical integration”: connecting the upstream (municipal child-rearing budgets and support programs) with the downstream (the daily lives of families), building the connective tissue between local governments, regional businesses, corporations, and the households that need to reach all of them.
To execute this vision, iiba has established a new executive team alongside this round: Tatsufumi Asayama joins as COO, bringing experience from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and healthtech startups; and Yuta Hiroto joins as CTO, with a background spanning Dwango, Mercari, and multiple new service launches.
The company has been featured on TV Tokyo’s Cambria Palace and recognized by Toyo Keizai’s “Amazing Ventures 100,” Nikkei Cross Trend’s “100 Companies Shaping the Future,” and EY Innovative Startup 2024, among others. CEO Nana Aizawa was also the first female entrepreneur to win Incubate Camp (17th cohort).
Why We Invested
The challenge surrounding childcare is not a lack of services — it’s that those services fail to reach the people who need them. iiba is building a new childcare infrastructure that connects communities, corporations, and municipalities, enabling natural access to the information and opportunities that matter. We were impressed by CEO Nana Aizawa’s exceptional leadership and her ability to bring together a remarkably diverse set of stakeholders. NEXTBLUE is fully committed to supporting iiba’s journey ahead.
