FORCIA

Both Hiroko and Tetsuro received MBA degrees from MIT Sloan School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked in the financial industry for over 10 years. Then, together, they founded FORCIA, Inc, with a goal to contribute to society and future generations, in a company environment that fosters employees to pursue self-fulfillment and enrich their lives. FORCIA's product is a site search platform that can be applied to all types of business engagements. The development of this platform has been guided by three underlying principles: It should be smart to fit human thinking and behavior, It should allow users to quickly get an over view of the big picture, and show what kind of choices exist, and answer where and how? It should be able to sort and prioritize items based on the end-users' preferences and priorities. The founding team focused on maintaining the end user's satisfaction throughout the search process and also incorporated their insights and experiences from the financial engineering sector. In the early 2000's, this model was quite different from the other available types of search software. Due to their unconventional approach and an unproven track record in conservative Japan, the first five years of the company were difficult. But eventually, after the founders persistent sales negotiations, the largest travel agency in Japan agreed to use FORCIA's product. Travel data is large and complex with millions of combinations, and adoption of FORCIA's search platform led to immediately boosted sales and the conversion rate. As this result became known, adoption within the Japanese travel industry spread, and today, most of the travel agencies in Japan are using FORCIA's platform. In addition, clients in other data-intensive business segments such as life sciences and retail have also chosen FORCIA for their search needs. Especially, FORCIA is currently supporting an industry leader in the life sciences category, to transition from a paper-based catalogue to a full e-commerce search site. The company's name 'FORCIA' is derived from the Latin phrase, "Citius, Altius, FORtius", which means "Faster, Higher, Stronger". This is also the motto of the Olympics, and expresses our aspiration to constantly challenge ourselves. We desire that people with the same spirit of "faster, higher and stronger", work together to achieve results, according to spirit of "fair" play. Fairness - Our Philosophy -