Recruit Holdings Establishes RGIP LLC, for Corporate Venture Capital Investments: Its First Project is Investment in a Vacation Rental Site by Tripping International Inc. (U.S.)

Recruit Holdings Co. Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and Representative Director, CEO: Masumi Minegishi; hereinafter referred to as "Recruit") today announced that it has established RGIP LLC (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Kazumasa Watanabe; Total amount of investment: 4.5 billion yen; hereinafter referred to as "RGIP"), to conduct corporate venture capital investment. In addition, it was also announced on May 9 that as RGIP's first project, it has invested in Tripping International Inc. (Headquarters: California USA; CEO:Jen O'Neal; hereinafter referred to as "Tripping International"), which developed and operates "Tripping," an aggregator website in the vacation rental business.

1. The purpose of the establishment of the Fund and its investment

The Recruit Group has been providing services mainly in Japan matching clients and users in a wide range of areas, from human resources and travel to restaurants, beauty and housing. At present, in both human resources and sales promotion, our aim is to be the No. 1 in not only the domestic market, but the global market as well, and we have been working hard to overcome borders and language differences to improve people's lives and lifestyles.

Our overseas business has been expanding its activity areas and services through mergers and establishment of joint ventures with companies in the United States, Europe, China, ASEAN, etc. In addition, we established a corporate venture capital in 2006 to aggressively invest in promising venture companies in Japan and overseas.

With the aim of further expediting overseas development in the future we established a new corporate venture capital with investment only in overseas companies. We believe that the management knowhow acquired in our domestic business can assist the further growth of the invested companies and, by extension, the matching business.

On May 9, as the first project for the new fund, RGIP completed investment in Tripping International.

Tripping International developed and operates "Tripping," an accommodation search engine in the vacation rental (holiday home rental) business, providing optimum accommodation information to individuals who want to rent a holiday home. Vacation rental is a popular form of accommodation in the USA and Europe, with a market scale of approx. 85 billion USD in USA and Europe alone,* approaching 1/3 of the scale of the hotel business. Tripping International boasts some 1.1 million listings, among the top level in the industry, due to having been one of the first to introduce the web search aggregator model (allowing automatic extraction and generation of applicable information from other sites) to the industry.

RGIP's investment is the result of judgment that the fusion of Tripping International's superior technological capabilities and customer-client base, with the business operation know-how cultivated by Recruit, will be effective in further developing the business in the future.

As part of our philosophy, Recruit will continue to invest in partner companies together with which we can attempt to "create new value," with the aim of helping more and more people all over the world to "Meet Your Opportunity."

*As of 2010, according to a survey by Radius Global Market Research

2. Overview of the Fund

3. Overview of Tripping International

Tripping is a travel site that makes it easy to search, compare and book vacation rentals and short term rentals. With over 1 million rentals in 36,000 cities, Tripping gives you the widest selection of unique accommodations around the world. You can easily compare the world's best home rentals by price, reviews, ratings and location. Whether you want to stay in an apartment, condo, cabin, castle, bungalow or boat, you can find your dream vacation rental (at your dream price) on Tripping.

Appendix: The Recruit Group's international businesses

For details of this matter, please check the following:

• 20140520_02.pdf

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