Vanten K.K. was started in 1998 by Neil van Wouw, after spending several years at one of the first Internet companies in Japan. Vanten focused on Internet service solutions for large companies, building out an ISP for one of the largest credit card companies in Japan, helping AOL docomo rollout its ADSL service nationally, and building the service provisioning and operational systems for the first MVNO data service in Japan.
In 2003, Vanten decided to launch its own service in the emerging digital signage business space, leapfrogging straight to a multi-tenant single-source cloud system, though cloud computing was barely a thing yet.
Through successive generations of its digital signage platform, Vanten has repeatedly led the charge into new areas, and is now set to go full throttle integrating blockchain with out-of-home media. In fact, blockchain has always been the missing piece in the vision of our digital signage platform dating back to 2003. For more info see 4.03 What is the long-term vision?