Rakus - Company History

IT Boost was incorporated in Miyakojima, Osaka, in November 2000. Nakamura Takanori had joined NTT around the time the internet began to spread in Japan, and later put it bluntly: the luck of happening to enter NTT at the dawn of the internet accounts, he said, for about 80% of why the company exists today. He left it on the reasoning that as long as there was food and somewhere to live, things would work out. Osaka was chosen for his own local ties and because competition for IT engineers was easier there than in Tokyo — the origin of a two-city structure the company still runs.

The business model was fixed within a year, and it had two legs. In April 2001 Rakus launched Mail Dealer, a shared inbox for customer enquiries sold on a monthly subscription — an ASP service years before the word SaaS settled in Japan, and the ancestor of the whole Rakuraku line. In May 2002 it started an IT staffing business, placing engineers it had trained itself on client sites. Subscription software takes years to reach scale and needs someone to fund the wait; the per-man-month cash from staffing paid for it. That pairing would define the company’s economics for more than twenty years.

The 2000s were spent building out that frame rather than changing it. A Tokyo branch opened in 2003 and was renamed a second head office in 2004, balancing metropolitan sales and recruiting against cheaper development in Kansai. A first acquisition, Exbit, was bought in 2005 and absorbed within a year — a speed of integration the company would repeat. In January 2010 IT Boost renamed itself Rakus, aligning the company with the Rakuraku (“make it easy”) product line; a San Francisco subsidiary followed in 2011, placed there, Nakamura said, to sit among Google and Stanford and soak up the essence of the industry.

The American subsidiary was renamed Rignite in 2012 and pointed entirely at a social-media marketing SaaS. Nakamura had argued that Japanese companies fail in the United States because they insist on remaining Japanese companies, and that doing it the American way would work well enough. In January 2015 he sold the whole of Rignite anyway. Against local rivals with deeper resources and denser sales channels, a Japanese SaaS firm could not sustain a direct-sales position in the US market — a lesson the company kept.

What replaced it was a different use of “overseas.” In May 2014 Rakus opened a wholly owned development subsidiary in Ho Chi Minh City — offshore engineering to scale product development rather than a place to sell. Domestic sales offices went into Nagoya and Fukuoka the same year. Selling abroad was given up; building abroad was kept.

In December 2015 Rakus listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market. Revenue for the year to March 2016 was ¥4.08 billion with operating profit of ¥780 million, the sixteenth straight year of growth and the fifteenth of profit. The next engine was already visible: Rakuraku Seisan, an expense-settlement service that removed, in Nakamura’s framing, the wasted work that came with paper and Excel, was beating its plan, and management chose in the year to March 2018 to hold profit growth flat and put the money into it instead.

In March 2018 Rakus set up Rakus Partners and in July transferred the IT staffing business into it. The point was accounting visibility as much as organization: as long as per-man-month staffing and recurring subscription revenue sat in the same statements, nobody outside could see what the SaaS business actually earned. Once separated, the SaaS segment’s margins were legible — and so, in time, was the case for whether the second leg was needed at all.

With the economics in view, the company spent heavily to buy growth. Advertising was pushed hard from the year to March 2020, taking profit down on purpose; then the pandemic arrived, remote work and paperless mandates hit exactly the expense-settlement and digitization services Rakus sold, and the accumulated advertising paid off at once. Revenue reached ¥15.39 billion in the year to March 2021 with operating profit of ¥3.90 billion, both records, and the listing moved up to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in March 2021.

From the year to March 2022 Rakus made the trade explicit: revenue up 34.1% to ¥20.63 billion, operating profit down 59.5% to ¥1.58 billion. It raised the floor of its five-year revenue CAGR target to 26% while aiming at 30%, told shareholders operating profit would bottom in the year to March 2024 and rise thereafter, and defended the arithmetic simply — if lifetime value exceeds customer acquisition cost by even ten yen, the business works. The listing moved to the Prime Market in April 2022 and sales offices spread to Sapporo, Hiroshima, Niigata and Shizuoka.

The portfolio was pruned at the same time. Rakus Light Cloud’s form-builder and rental-server lines were transferred out in 2023; Rakus HR Tech was carved out of HOYA that July and absorbed into the parent within a year, the same fast integration pattern as 2005. The investment phase then delivered: revenue of ¥38.41 billion and operating profit of ¥5.56 billion in the year to March 2024, then $326.8M (¥49bn) in revenue, up 27.3%, with operating profit up 83.3% to ¥10.19 billion — past ¥10 billion for the first time, and every five-year target met.

The last support went in 2026. In the first quarter of the year to March 2026 Rakus announced the sale of all shares in Rakus Partners, with an extraordinary gain of ¥16.7 billion and completion set for 1 April 2026, ending the two-legged structure it had run for twenty-six years. What remains is the cloud business — Rakuraku Seisan, Rakuraku Meisai, Rakuraku Kintai, Mail Dealer — plus the Vietnamese and Indonesian subsidiaries; the residual internet-access and hosting businesses were transferred out in April 2025. Southeast Asia is being approached in the reverse order of 2011: a 14.9% stake in an Indonesian firm in December 2024, then a wholly owned Jakarta subsidiary in April 2025. Nakamura has run the company throughout, and the four retreats — America, non-core services, staffing separation, staffing sale — describe one continuous narrowing carried out over twenty-five years.