Japanius Co., Ltd., a Yokohama-based engineering services company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth market, has agreed to buy dotsline Inc., a Tokyo startup that designs and builds corporate data platforms. Japanius disclosed the deal in a filing after the market closed on October 29, 2026, and put out a press release the next morning.
Japanius said it would pay 2.5 billion yen (about $16.2 million) in cash for 9,312 of dotsline's 9,900 shares, a 94.1% stake, with the purchase set to close on October 30. It will then take the remaining 588 shares through a share exchange due to take effect on November 26, giving dotsline's holders 136.40 Japanius shares for each dotsline share, or 80,203 shares in total. Japanius will use shares it already holds in treasury rather than issue new ones. Acquisition costs are not included in the 2.5 billion yen figure.
Matsumoto (松本祐輝), dotsline's chief executive, will stay on to run the company. Japanius said it is considering nominating Matsumoto and dotsline director Sano (佐野亮太朗) to its own board.
What dotsline built
dotsline was set up on November 28, 2023, and is based in Tsukiji, in Tokyo's Chuo ward. It plans, designs, builds and runs data platforms: the systems that gather data scattered across a company, combine it, and control its quality and who can see it. It works with Google Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, and its website also lists dashboards, data marketing consulting, generative AI and large language model set-ups, and machine learning work.
The filing shows a small company that has grown quickly. dotsline had seven employees. Sales rose from 6.6 million yen in its first financial year to October 2024 to 219 million yen (about $1.4 million) in the year to October 2025, with operating profit of 44 million yen. For the year ending October 2026, it forecast sales of about 582 million yen (about $3.8 million) and operating profit of about 171 million yen.
There is no sign of outside investors. The filing lists two individual shareholders, Matsumoto and Sano, as owning all of dotsline's shares, and they are the sellers in the cash purchase. The company raised its share capital to 10 million yen and split each share into 100 in December 2025. It has also built a training platform for data engineers.
Why Japanius is buying
Japanius was founded in December 1999. It places engineers at client sites and does contract development, mostly in AI, IoT and cloud work. It had 2,021 employees and reported sales of about 12.1 billion yen (about $78 million) and operating profit of 983 million yen for the year to November 2025. Its long-term goal is to employ 10,000 digital engineers, and its medium-term plan includes growth through acquisitions.
In the filing, Japanius said dotsline is a young company that needs more engineers and more customers to grow. Japanius plans to move some of its own engineers into data-platform work, train them through dotsline projects, and sell the service through its offices around Japan and its customer base, which it said is made up mainly of listed companies.
The press release splits the work between the two. dotsline will lead early-stage planning and technical design, and Japanius will provide the engineers to build and run the systems. Japanius will also use dotsline's training platform, with its skills checks, personal learning plans and practice exercises, to build up its own data staff. Japanius said it wants data and AI to become a new growth area for the group, with platforms ready for companies to use generative AI and AI agents.
How the price was set
Japanius hired Five Star Partners, an independent valuer, to set the exchange ratio. Using a discounted cash flow model, it valued each dotsline share at between 236,757 and 304,909 yen. It valued Japanius shares at 1,985 to 2,003 yen, based on recent market prices. That gave a ratio range of 119.29 to 153.63, and the agreed 136.40 sits inside it. At those Japanius share prices, the 80,203 shares in the exchange would be worth roughly 160 million yen (about $1 million), based on this publication's calculation.
To help pay for the cash portion, Japanius is borrowing 1 billion yen (about $6.5 million) from Bank of Yokohama for five years, starting October 30. It said the loan would have only a minor effect on its results. It expects to book goodwill on the deal but has not yet set the amount, and it is still assessing the effect on its results for the year ending November 2026.
Market reaction
Japanius shares rose in morning trading on October 30. Fisco, in a report carried by Diamond's ZAi Online, put them at 2,040 yen, up 20 yen, and tied the gain to the dotsline announcement.
