SOPHOLA was awarded Japan’s first “Top50 Tech Companies Award” at a technology event called Intercon held in Dubai on October 14-16, 2019.

However, when I first got contacted by Intercon, I honestly wondered:
“What does this award mean to SOPHOLA, which has only been a year and a half since its establishment?”
I even felt that we should ignore the recognition because it would be spam. lol
In this impression, I will look back on the reason for the selection and the meaning of the award.

The first thing I did was to contact Intercon for the selection process and criteria, and the list of companies that have won so far. As a result, we contacted 200-250 nominated companies for each award, the nominees need to exceed 75 out of 100 for each of the following criteria to win the award.
・ Overall Reach
・ Industry Impact
・ Spirit of Innovation
・ Future Readiness
・ Market Demand

In the process of confirming each one of them, I started feeling that SOPHOLA, a small company that has just been founded in Japan, has been nominated and selected” itself has a sense of value. Because there are many candidate companies around the world at overseas technology events, our existence has been recognized and our efforts should be highly evaluated to a certain extent.

Most of the companies that received the Top 50 Tech Companies Award were the seed and series A startups in the Middle East and India, but I think that it was meaningful that we could be still recognized by Intercon. Every day, every employee works hard to develop new services and expand the client portfolio. Although it is still a long way to go to become “Top 50” in the true sense, I would like all employees to feel proud of being recognized as “Top 50” at least in this region and organization scale.

SOPHOLA will continue to challenge various fields in the future, and in two years, the B2B E-Commerce Business for Japanese traditional crafts will start full-scale operation. By continuing to improve as a company, we would like to devote ourselves to becoming “Top 50” or higher in each phase.

I would like to say “Thank you!” to clients, partners, family members, friends, and all employees who have supported SOPHOLA so far. Thank you for your continued support.

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc