Evernote announced today that it has raised $20 million in new capital from Nikkei, the Japanese media conglomerate that publishes the influential financial newspaper Nikkei, as well English-language Nikkei Asian Review. In addition, the Nikkei will also start feeding articles into Evernote’s Context feature, which launched last month.
Context brings information from third-party sources into the app so users can read news articles and other content alongside their own documents and notes. Nikkei is the first international news source that has been integrated into Evernote Context and the partnership is expected to become available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business subscribers by early 2015.
Evernote Context looks at data in your files and feeds you news articles and other information that it thinks you will find relevant. As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden noted last month, this builds into Evernote’s attempt to build its content discovery play, a similar strategy to the ones taken by Facebook and Twitter as they seek ways to encourage people to spend more time on their sites. Libin has said that Evernote is considering an IPO within the next few years.
Evernote’s partnership with Nikkei is also interesting because it’s a reminder that a good portion of its international user base comes from Japan. At the Japan New Economy Summit in April 2013, CEO Phil Libin said, “About 20% of our users and 30% of our revenue comes from Japan. The Japanese aesthetic really influences us. We have said from the beginning that we want to make it a 100 year startup, and that was influenced by Japan. Japan understands this idea of long term thinking, and we hope to combine that with the best of Silicon Valley.”
The content integration with Nikkei comes at the same time as full Japanese-language support for Evernote Context on Mac and iOS, which will be expanded to Android and Windows next.