Bitkey
Harbingers of the ‘Connect’

In this era of software and application development democratization, the user experience still has a long way to go. According to users, there appears to be a significant division between multiple digital and physical and digital platforms. To fill this void, Yuki Ejiri, Masaki Fukuzawa, and Masanori Hotsuki founded Bitkey in 2018.

Bitkey is a ‘connect-tech’ company that aims to connect digital and physical goods and services to eliminate the division of experience in all aspects of life: home, work, and leisure/entertainment.

“Looking at our company through the eyes of the consumer and continuously evolving our products through the collaboration between the engineering departments and the customer experience departments are the source of Bitkey’s strength,” says Yuki Ejiri, the CEO of Bitkey.

Ejiri provides two prominent examples from users’ day-to-day lives while elaborating on the divided experiences that Bitkey seeks to eliminate.

For instance, each smartphone app may have been well thought out on a standalone software level.

However, the issue of logging in or paying from each app makes the experience difficult for a user who must constantly switch between them.
A similar division separates the real and digital worlds as well. When making an online purchase, one can pay from anywhere.

But, in certain countries such as Japan, in-person delivery is common, causing difficulties for the parties as you need to be at home at the time of the delivery to receive the package. Bitkey defines these divisions as societal issues, and the company’s ‘connect everything’ mission aims to bridge these divisions.

It creates hardware and software products and services to implement smart experiences in the real and digital worlds, with a focus on digital IDs that are safe and convenient to use.

Bitkey has a core ID linkage, authentication, and rights processing technology called the ‘Bitkey Platform’.

Using this platform as a base layer, mobile applications and Software as a Service (SaaS) are offered as a user interface to serve B2C and B2B customers.

Its solutions are dynamic and flexible and best suited to enterprise customers’ needs.

As a layer built based on ‘Bitkey Platform,’ it provides all-in-one solutions, also known as ‘hub applications.’ These hub applications are divided into three domains: home hub, work hub, and experience hub. Each hub adds two distinct propositions: allowing diverse customization based on what facilities the residential properties or offices have and users’ needs and allowing control of various devices of manufacturers they collaborate with from a single platform by integrating Bitkey’s chip. This improves user experience and makes meeting each customer’s intricate requirements easier.

The majority of home hub’s customers are property management firms and developers of residential properties. Bitkey is providing smart access to rooms with homehub allowing residents and other stakeholders to enter the rooms without using physical keys.

This is referred to as ‘homehub inside’ and aims to distinguish one property from another for residents. For example, Leopalace21, one of the largest property management companies, and Mitsui Fudosan Residential, a leading Japanese housing development company, have switched from using physical keys to digital ones utilizing homehub.

As for Leopalace21, their 440,000 residential units will be ‘homehub inside’ and their core system and service platforms are also connected to homehub.

Workhub’s customers include building owners and companies that need to manage their workplaces, like co-working or shared offices. Bitkey’s workhub function adapts the digital infrastructure to fit the users’ experience, eliminating the hassle of using multiple systems and double registration. Workhub’s successful implementation assisted the Japanese retail giant—H2O Retailing Corporation—when it relocated to a new office in 2022.

This office had removed all the fixed seats, and the system was considered to introduce seat reservation of shared workspaces, receiving notifications of guest visits, and sharing location data of employees. H2O Retailing Corporation ascertained that leveraging multiple systems was highly time-consuming and inefficient. Therefore, they selected workhub to provide an all-pervasive solution. Workhub enabled the employees to search and reserve a variety of workspaces from a single application and choose where to work autonomously.

Furthermore, doors can now be opened and closed using facial recognition, and the system can be linked to Google Calendar and Gmail, ending the need for shifting between or registering the same information to multiple systems. This, in turn, enhanced work comfort and efficiency.

The hubs are a subset of the larger hub infrastructure known as the ‘Connect OS’ within the ‘Bitkey Platform’ that aims to improve the ‘connect-tech’ aspect of the business.

The ‘Bitkey Platform’ includes several core features like ‘Open History Data,’ ‘Secure Data Storage, ’ and ‘Data Hub.’

These functions manage and maintain securely protected data and shareable transaction data.

Based on their technology and achievements, Bitkey has been chosen to team up with the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion through the activities of the ‘Platform Data Infrastructure’ working group at the Osaka World Expo in 2025, expanding its global outreach.