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Last updated on July 24, 2025
Serial unicorn founder, Yasukane Matsumoto, built a global SaaS business from the Asia-Pacific. Now, he’s looking to transform Josys with agentic AI.
Yasukane Matsumoto is no stranger to building a category-defining business. As the founder of Raksul, the “Uber for printing,” he created Japan’s largest online printing platform with 3.5 million users by utilising spare printer capacity across the country. After taking Raksul public at a unicorn valuation in 2018, he turned his attention to a new universal problem he witnessed firsthand during the pandemic.
The rapid shift to remote work caused an explosion in IT spending and a chaotic loss of control over software subscriptions – what Yasukane describes as “SaaS sprawl.” After speaking with fellow entrepreneurs across Japan and in the US and Singapore, he realised every company was struggling with this issue, yet no platform existed to manage it.
This realisation sparked the idea for Josys, a modern identity and SaaS management platform. With the mission to “Simplify IT, Empower Community,” Josys tames the complexity of the modern IT stack so companies can achieve their governance, security, and cost goals.
Now, Yasukane is looking to take Josys to its next evolution and transform into an agentic AI company.
Josys: Building a Global SaaS Startup
Yasukane launched Josys in 2022 and raised a $32m Series A later that year. Josys has raised over $220m to date and operates in Japan, the US, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond, with employees in eight different countries across the world.
“The biggest challenge we face right now is unification,” Yasukane reflects. When you’re a global startup, it’s easy for each region to evolve in isolation – you might have one sales approach in Japan, a different customer success methodology in the US, and a unique user support process in Australia.
“Our challenge is to unify our global operations into one team, one system, and one playbook to grow the company,” Yasukane says. “This process of integration is our key focus. Establishing a unified way of working across all markets is a significant challenge, but it’s absolutely critical for us to scale effectively as one cohesive company.”
Going Global from the Asia-Pacific
The Asia-Pacific (APAC) software market represents around 24% of the global software market, although many software firms don’t prioritise the APAC region due to diverse regulatory landscapes, focusing on the larger US market instead.
For Josys, however, the Asia-Pacific is home. At FF Asia 2025, Yasukane shared stories of scaling his businesses across diverse international markets. He explained how Josys maintains 80% consistent playbooks across markets while allowing 20% localisation.
As Josys has expanded across APAC and Southeast Asia, the company is using AI to optimise its engineering team while increasing productivity tenfold.
“While the US is certainly a very key market for us, we consider the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, to be our mother market,” Yasukane says.
“This gives us a distinct advantage. While other companies from the US or Europe may overlook APAC, we have a firm foothold here. This focus is a core part of our identity.”
Becoming an Agentic AI company
Yasukane’s ambition for the next 12 months is to begin Josys’ transformation into an agentic AI company.
“If you think about it,” Yasukane reflects, “traditional SaaS is a combination of an interface, a database, and the workflow that connects them. We are now entering the era of agentic AI, which I believe will define 2025 and beyond.”
While agentic AI won’t necessarily replace SaaS, he says, it will change who, or what, operates it. “The operator will shift from a human to an AI agent, and this will automate operations in a way we’ve never seen before.”
Advice for Global Tech Founders
Whatever your focus, when building a global business Yasukane says being customer-centric is key. “My advice is to focus entirely on getting your first 50 – or even 20 – paying customers.”
You need to see customers consistently using your product, being happy to pay for it, and ultimately renewing their contracts. “It sounds obvious, but this is the core of achieving product-market fit,” Yasukane explains.
Before you achieve that, you can’t start scaling the conversation, you can’t hire a team, and you can’t achieve your mission. The first and most critical task for any entrepreneur, Yasukane says, is to develop the product and make the sales necessary to achieve product-market fit, one step at a time.
