kubell's Masaki Yamamoto on BPaaS Strategy: Turning Chatwork's Customer Base into BPO for SMEs

kubell was originally called "Chatwork," the same as its product. Yamamoto recalls that people around them repeatedly asked, "Are you sure about this?" and said, "That's brave," about changing such a well-known company name. A company name is not something that can be changed easily, and Yamamoto admits it was a decision that took courage.

The trigger for the change was the BPaaS business. When Chatwork was the company's only product, having the company name match the product name made things easy to understand. But once the company expanded into businesses such as outsourced accounting and payroll processing for HR and labor administration, the Chatwork name was too strongly associated with business chat. People would ask, "Why is a chat company doing accounting and labor administration?", which actually made explaining the business more costly. For kubell, which wants to grow its business as a platform, being seen as just a chat company would limit its potential. That judgment led to the name change.

"kubell" comes not from English but from the Japanese phrase maki wo kuberu, "to add firewood to a fire." The company has long held the mission "Make work more fun and creative," and the name expresses its wish to be something that adds fuel to the hearts of working people. According to Yamamoto, however, the main reason was to establish a unified brand for developing diverse businesses in the BPaaS space.

According to Yamamoto, work becomes fun and creative when people can fully devote themselves to the work they want to do. kubell therefore aims to take over clients' non-core work and create an environment in which they can concentrate on their core work.

Non-core work refers to administrative tasks such as accounting, labor administration, and general affairs. Core work, for a restaurant, is making delicious food: devising recipes, honing skills, and serving customers. For a manufacturer, it means maintaining equipment and drawing up solid designs. In Yamamoto's view, if everything else can be outsourced cheaply via chat, restaurant owners will have more time for cooking. When delicious food is created, customers are happy, sales, profit, and productivity rise, and the people doing the work enjoy it more. In that sense, BPaaS is a business directly tied to the company's mission.

When Iijima asked, "So that isn't the case now?", Yamamoto replied that it isn't. Every company needs tasks such as cash flow management, accounting, and payroll transfers. But food service professionals are not necessarily back-office professionals. In many cases, they lose time to work outside their expertise and handle it while anxiously wondering, "Is this right?"

As the reason the problem is more serious for smaller companies, Yamamoto points to differences in organizational structure. Large companies have headquarters functions that consolidate administrative work, allowing business divisions to focus on their main operations. SMEs have to handle everything in-house, and back-office staff often wear many hats on their own. When there still aren't enough hands, the president takes it on personally. Productivity would rise if work could be divided and given to people who are good at it, but small companies can't manage that, in Yamamoto's assessment.

As the biggest progress in the most recent financial results, Yamamoto cited BPaaS revenue exceeding ¥1 billion on an annual basis, reaching double-digit hundreds of millions of yen. Until now, nearly all revenue came from Chatwork, and BPaaS was still at the stage of being explained as a concept. What was launched as a new business is no longer a new business but one of the company's pillars. Yamamoto assesses it as a year in which the company turned a concept into a concrete business.

According to Yamamoto, the term "BPaaS" was put forward by kubell in its earnings presentations around 2023. At the time, search volume on Google Trends was nearly zero. Now, around 10 to 20 listed companies mention BPaaS in their earnings materials, and it has become a category of its own.

Yamamoto explains that the market BPaaS targets is business process outsourcing, or BPO. BPO has existed for decades. There are two routes of entry: existing BPO companies incorporating elements of DX and calling themselves BPaaS, and SaaS startups expanding into BPaaS by taking on the operational side as well.

Among these, kubell's distinguishing feature is that it owns the Chatwork platform, Yamamoto says. Chatwork has more than 8 million users and over 900,000 companies using it, and it is especially widespread among SMEs. Typical SaaS companies tend to shift their focus toward large enterprise customers, where sales efficiency is higher. Chatwork, by contrast, is used widely by SMEs of up to around 300 employees, which is a major difference.

Yamamoto illustrates the importance of the SME market with numbers. SMEs make up 99% of Japan's corporations and around 70% of its workforce; Japan is a country run by SMEs. But because sales efficiency per company is poor, DX has not advanced and ways of working have not changed. Chatwork, on the other hand, is a tool that spreads by word of mouth; even with zero sales and marketing, it spreads among SMEs through referrals. Owning a platform that can reach SMEs efficiently is kubell's greatest positional advantage, Yamamoto says.

What SMEs are struggling with most right now is being unable to hire, Yamamoto says. With fewer young people, there are even cases of companies going bankrupt due to labor shortages despite being profitable. Hiring is one solution, but outsourcing is another option. kubell wants to present BPO as a means.

Traditional BPO, however, took the form of large-scale, custom-made contracts for each company handled at operations centers. As a result, small jobs were often turned down. BPO was considered something used by mid-sized and larger companies, and SMEs couldn't use it even when they needed it, Yamamoto points out.

kubell can reach SMEs at low sales cost through Chatwork. In addition, it creates common "templates" for work such as accounting and labor administration shared across multiple companies, and runs SaaS and AI behind the scenes. This allows it to deliver services cheaply, with high quality, quickly, and in small lots. Yamamoto positions kubell as the only company that can offer BPO to the SME market—which has never been able to benefit from BPO—in a way that solves labor shortages while also advancing DX. He also expressed the view that many other BPaaS offerings are either aimed at large companies or specialized in the domain of their own SaaS.

Yamamoto also cited Chatwork's customer touchpoints as the reason the company was able to generate ¥1 billion in revenue in a short period. There's no need to pitch unfamiliar companies with "Please install our chat and let us handle your work through it." Instead, the company can propose to existing users, "Thank you for always using Chatwork. We can handle your accounting as an extension of the Chatwork you already use," so conversations start halfway along. Demand is extremely high, and maintaining the capacity to take it on is actually the harder part. Yamamoto says the business can grow as much as the company builds out its capacity.

Having established the scale and shape of BPaaS in 2025, Yamamoto says the major theme for 2026 is turning it into a profitable business while maintaining its current growth rate.

Entering BPO was a first for kubell. For that reason, the company is currently hiring many people and, rather than fitting clients into templates, learning how to carry out the work by interviewing each company one by one. That means there is also a lot of inefficiency. But at this scale, the overall volume becomes visible and commonalities across multiple tasks become clear. Yamamoto believes efficiency can be improved by building out templates, shared SaaS, and operations.

AI's evolution is also a tailwind, he says. The company intends to incorporate AI, which is making major leaps every few months. Because BPO is labor-intensive and incurs personnel costs, its profit margins are considered lower than those of IT products such as SaaS. Yamamoto said he wants to prove this year that, through templating, SaaS adoption, and the use of AI, BPaaS can achieve profit margins that rival SaaS.

Iijima asked whether AI might also look like a competitor to BPaaS. Yamamoto's answer was that the two are highly compatible. Like call centers and sales, labor-intensive BPO is said to be on track for replacement by AI. Concepts such as AI workers have emerged, and Yamamoto expects the range of tasks AI takes over from people to keep expanding.

However, he also thinks this will take time. BPaaS covers a wide range of areas, including accounting, labor administration, and general affairs. Building individual AI agents has recently become a trend, but applying them directly to each company and running everything fully automatically is difficult with today's AI. Yamamoto predicts a phase in which people and AI work side by side will last for years, and the company's policy is to pair people with AI to raise human productivity.

Asked whether people will ultimately become unnecessary, Yamamoto says no, because human relationships with clients are important in BPO. AI can handle a certain amount automatically, but SMEs in particular value face-to-face communication—seeing "this is the person doing the work for us," for example via video calls. Yamamoto believes people will continue to handle the part where they build trust with clients and communicate with them while checking the output AI produces. People will gravitate toward work only people can do, while the parts that keep operations running will be increasingly automated by AI. Yamamoto compared this to self-driving cars: starting from a stage where only highways are autonomous, the share of automation gradually increases. He also said that Japan alone has a market of around ¥40 trillion, and the company will tackle it with a combination of people and technology.

As another reason people remain necessary even as AI advances, Yamamoto also raised the issue of data. From what Yamamoto has heard, today's AI has learned only about 0.001% of the world's data. The remaining roughly 99.999% is private data that hasn't been learned. What products a company handles, who its customers are, what its employees' personalities are like—OpenAI and Google have no way to learn such information, yet for some tasks it is crucially important.

That's why it's necessary to carefully interview clients and pass that context to AI—what is known as "providing context." Yamamoto explains that this is difficult for AI alone, and that only people can build trust with clients while drawing out private information and passing it to AI. When Iijima responded, "There's also the initial hurdle of whether clients feel it's safe to entrust that information in the first place," Yamamoto agreed that trust is extremely important because it comes down to communication between people. He added that he believes sales will never be taken over by AI, because only people can move other people's hearts.

kubell is also actively pursuing M&A and disclosed its track record in its most recent financial results as well. According to Yamamoto, there are two main directions for its M&A.

The first is turning Chatwork into a super app. Aiming for a platform where users can do all sorts of things once they're on Chatwork, the company is acquiring companies with products. It has brought a cloud storage company into the group, and most recently acquired a SaaS product that digitizes invoice processing through a business transfer. The company wants to create a world where all kinds of things run on Chatwork.

The startups Yamamoto wants to bring in are those that have good products that resonate with SMEs but face challenges in marketing or sales. With Chatwork's overwhelming reach to send customers their way, a good product can grow significantly. Behind this is an environment in which VCs have become more hesitant to invest due to issues such as the IPO "¥10 billion problem," and IPOs are no longer the only exit option. More startups are seeking M&A, and kubell is being approached far more often.

The second is expanding the BPaaS domain by pursuing a roll-up of BPO providers. A roll-up is a strategy of successively acquiring businesses in the same industry to pursue scale. Yamamoto cited GENDA, which has acquired many arcades, and SHIFT, which has acquired many SI companies, as well-known examples.

In kubell's case, BPO providers join the group and become part of the BPaaS framework. This brings in clients and operators as a set, allowing faster growth than securing clients from scratch through hiring and marketing. As an example, about two years ago the company acquired MINAGINE, an Osaka-based provider of payroll processing BPO. MINAGINE had also been aiming for BPaaS on its own, so it joined as a company sharing the same aspirations.

There are a great many BPO providers out there, Yamamoto says. Acquisition targets range widely from small companies to large ones. The top priority is the two major areas of labor administration and accounting, where the markets are extremely large, and he said these are areas the company absolutely wants to capture. There is also sales administration and the like, but that consists of a collection of smaller tasks. kubell's concept is to do everything as a one-stop shop, and while there are priorities, it will eventually cover all areas. The company is also interested in BPO for areas such as recruitment process outsourcing and IT, and Yamamoto revealed that it recently launched recruitment outsourcing. The company wants to create a world in which "if you ask kubell, they'll handle everything."

kubell also has a CVC and makes minority investments. According to Yamamoto, investments are premised on capital and business alliances. After investing, kubell sends customers to the startup and receives a fee per lead. The startup wins more orders and grows its revenue, while kubell earns revenue from referrals. The investment can be recouped early through the business alliance, and that money can fund investments in new companies. Furthermore, if a portfolio company exits through an IPO or M&A, kubell can also earn capital gains. Yamamoto considers this a highly efficient CVC.

An example of a CVC investment leading to a group acquisition is Paytner's invoice business. kubell invested in Paytner through its CVC and had been actively sending customers its way with good results. But Paytner's factoring business was growing rapidly, and the company wanted to focus on that. The invoice scanning business was also growing, but nearly all of its customer acquisition came from kubell's referrals, to the point where it couldn't stand without kubell. That led to the idea of kubell taking it over, and the business was transferred. Yamamoto describes this as a case that flowed cleanly from the CVC. He says there are also other inquiries, such as portfolio companies that are growing but for which an IPO looks difficult, so they are considering M&A.

Toward the end, Yamamoto once again spoke about the appeal of the SME market. Seventy percent of Japan's workforce works at SMEs. Meanwhile, there is roughly a threefold gap in labor productivity per person between large companies and SMEs, with SMEs at only about one-third the level of large companies. Moreover, this situation has been flat for 30 to 40 years. Yamamoto describes this as ways of working remaining unchanged since the Showa era. Turned around, that means there is a great deal of room for improvement and a large market opportunity.

There are many areas where introducing IT tools would dramatically raise productivity. But because each company is small and their needs are not yet apparent, sales efficiency is poor and vendors can't go out and sell to them. kubell can reach them through business chat and get into their business processes through BPaaS. In the course of taking on the work, kubell can advance DX on its own side using SaaS. Clients are simply chatting, and before they know it, DX is progressing behind the scenes. Having this mechanism is a major strength, Yamamoto says.

Yamamoto also connects this issue to society as a whole. Amid the declining birthrate and aging population, the burden on the working-age generation of supporting social security for a large elderly population keeps growing. The biggest bottleneck, he says, is the situation of SMEs, where 70% of the population works at one-third the productivity. Yamamoto said, "Honestly, I think we're about the only ones who can solve this." At the same time, he acknowledged that kubell can't do it alone, and called on companies with good products for SMEs to partner with kubell—not only through M&A but also through business alliances. He believes that if the approach of "if you're serving SMEs, do it with kubell" spreads, SMEs' challenges will be solved and their productivity will rise.

In his closing message, Yamamoto said BPaaS has finally moved from the concept stage to the proof stage, where results can be shown in numbers. Conventional IT tools such as SaaS were designed so that the more IT-savvy someone was, the more their productivity increased. Yamamoto positions BPaaS as a fundamental service that enables DX even for people who aren't good with IT. DX and ICT adoption have been promoted many times under different names, yet people whose ways of working haven't changed in 30 to 40 years still make up the majority of society. Yamamoto believes BPaaS has the potential to change this situation and move society in a big way. He concluded the conversation by saying that kubell is betting on that potential.