Business Development Manager
About the job
- At least five years of experience in business development, business planning, or strategic partnerships, including at least two years of people-management experience.
- A track record of owning and driving a business line or new business launch with revenue accountability; strategy planning or planning-only experience does not qualify.
- Experience negotiating and closing complex external partnerships, including deals with unprecedented and highly uncertain structures and negotiations with executives.
- A proactive and positive startup mindset, with flexibility and high motivation to take on assignments regardless of prior familiarity, duties, or assignment duration when needed for company growth or its mission.
- Generative AI literacy, including keeping up with AI technologies and industry developments; routinely using AI tools to improve personal and team output; understanding current limitations; and verifying AI outputs before incorporating them into final work.
- Business-level Japanese or higher.
- Own the revenue plan for assigned businesses, including designing business models, pricing and packaging, and accountability for results.
- Identify, negotiate, and close strategic partnerships with content and intellectual-property holders, stores and partner companies, distribution partners, and technology vendors, managing the process from initial contact through contract and launch.
- Build and manage the business development team, including hiring, goal-setting, and team development for a team of 2–4 people.
- Represent the business perspective in product roadmap discussions by structuring market and partner insights for Product and Engineering and influencing development priorities.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives for launching new businesses to market with Legal, Finance, Sales, and other departments.
- Build foundational business processes, including pipeline management, partner reporting, and deal governance.
- Manage operations for the Next Generation Business Division team, including resource planning, and develop and execute operating plans.
- A network of prospective partners in Japan for new consumer businesses, including local commerce and stores, content and intellectual-property holders, and platform companies.
- Experience commercializing new digital products, including pricing, licensing, and usage-based models.
- Experience at a professional consulting firm, particularly at least five years at a Tier 1 strategy consulting firm, or completion of an MBA.
- Experience launching a business from zero to one in an environment with unestablished processes.
- Strong interest in building and scaling new consumer businesses in the AI era.
- Business-level English or higher.
About the company
SmartNews aggregates news from over 3,000 publishers into a single app, letting users read a wide range of stories in one place. It relies on machine learning to analyze articles, social signals, and user behavior to surface trending and relevant news, with features like SmartView for fast reading and offline access. The service earns mainly from ads and revenue-sharing deals with publishers, plus SmartNews+ for premium content from many media partners. Its goal is to reduce information overload by providing broad, newspaper-like discovery rather than hyper-personalized feeds, while sustaining the business through publisher partnerships and advertising.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Debt Financing
Total Funding
$486.5M
Headquarters
Tokyo, Japan
Founded
2012
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- April 2026 Docomo renamed My Magazine to SmartNews for docomo, expanding Japanese reach.
- May 2026 SmartNews Ads Conference named 64 partner agencies, including CyberAgent and Hakuhodo DY ONE.
- July 17, 2026 AI Transformation Division signals product velocity and cost automation focus.
What critics are saying
- Bloomberg's March 2026 Tokyo IPO report set up a likely down-round versus 2021 valuation.
- SmartNews depends on publisher traffic and ad agencies; AP, Reuters, and media partners can renegotiate.
- Google and Apple control distribution; App Store ranking changes can crush installs overnight.
What makes SmartNews unique
- SmartView and 4,500+ publisher network preserve a clean, cross-source reading habit.
- SmartNews Rewards, launched March 25, 2026, monetizes reading with gift-card incentives.
- Docomo partnership and 64 agency partners deepen distribution across Japan and ads.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
0%1 year growth
0%2 year growth
1%Our latest funding round was led by Development Bank of Japan, followed by SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P. (managed by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Investment). The new funds will be used to accelerate growth, hiring and business development, and to expand research and development of our machine learning technology for news discovery.
TOKYO (August 8) -- SmartNews, the free, award-winning news-discovery app for iOS and Android, has raised $36 million in Series B funding, with significant investments from international investment firm Atomico and global mobile-social company GREE.
SmartNews has launched a rewards programme in the US that allows users to earn points for reading news articles, marking the first initiative of its kind amongst American news apps according to the company's research. Users are automatically enrolled in challenges to earn points by reading a specified number of articles within set timeframes. Points can be redeemed through the Tango Rewards platform for gift cards at retailers like Amazon or charitable donations to organisations including the Special Olympics. The programme follows a successful rollout in Japan and underwent beta testing in the US from December 2025, showing strong adoption. Founded in 2012, SmartNews serves millions of users globally through partnerships with over 3,000 publishers and uses machine learning technology for news discovery.
SmartNews, a news app available in Japan and the US, closed its Series E1 funding round in July 2019, achieving a valuation exceeding ¥100 billion, thus becoming a "unicorn." The funding was led by ACA Investments, with continued support from Globis Capital Partners. The company is focused on expanding in the US market, with plans for an IPO. Key figures involved in the funding include Tetsuya Matsumoto from SmartNews, Hiroyuki Ono from ACA, and Minoru Konno from GCP.
Japan’s startup sector, despite being one of the biggest in the world, has lagged behind other regions like the U.S., China, and the U.K., in terms of the number of unicorns and the scale of venture capital investment. For years, an aging population, overall economic deflation, and salarymen’s inclination to work at traditional, big corporations meant the startup life wasn’t an attractive one for many.For context: Per a recent IMF report that cites CB Insights data, as of October 2023, the U.S. had about 661 unicorns, China counted 172, and the U.K. had 52. Japan had a mere seven unicorns. (PitchBook pegs the number of Japanese startups at nine, so it’s possible we have more unicorns in the market than these datasets suggest.)But things are looking up — somewhat