Nature

Notes compiled from publicly available sources. Last updated: 2026-10-11. Every figure is linked to the source it came from and dated. Verify against primary sources before relying on them.

TL;DR

Nature (Nature株式会社 / Nature Inc., corporate number 4130001055679) is a Yokohama-based hardware and energy-management company. Its official company page gives 2014-12-10 as the founding date; the CEO says the company was first registered in the United States in December 2014 while he was at Harvard Business School, and the Japanese legal entity was called Nature Japan株式会社 until 2019-08-07. It sells the Nature Remo smart infrared remote, the Nature Remo E home energy management system (HEMS, called スマホHEMS by the company), the Nature EV Switch EV-charging controller and the Nature Lock smart lock, all used through the "Nature Home" app. It also sells a demand-response (DR) support service to electricity retailers and a cloud API.

• Scale: "累計販売台数80万台を超える" (over 800,000 cumulative units) for the Nature Remo series (2026-10-01 release); a backend posting states that over 450,000 IoT devices are connected to the Nature Remo cloud (Backend Engineer posting, datePosted 2025-05-16; accessed 2026-10-11).
• Funding: latest announced round is a シリーズD totalling approx. 12.2億円 (10.2億円 closed in February 2024 plus an undisclosed additional amount from 脱炭素化支援機構, announced 2024-06-27). BRIDGE put publicly disclosed funding since founding at over 25億円 (BRIDGE, 2024-06-28). The statutory financial notice for the year ended 2026-03-31 reports a net loss of 1億9561万円 (官報決算データベース).
• Team: 56 people including contractors and interns (company page; Undated; accessed 2026-10-11); the company deck gives 45 employees, with software engineers at 38% of full-time roles (company deck, modified 2026-05-31).
• Engineering: Go backend on AWS (ECS, Aurora MySQL, ElastiCache Redis, DynamoDB), React Native/TypeScript app, C/C++ firmware on ESP32/ESP-IDF with Rust named in postings; devices talk Wi-Fi, BLE, Wi-SUN, LTE-M, Matter and ECHONET Lite (engineering blog, 2021-04-29, Firmware Engineer posting, datePosted 2026-09-18). Postings are in Japanese and the Backend Engineer posting requires native-level Japanese; engineering roles allow full remote work with about one company-wide office day per month (posting; accessed 2026-10-11).

Basic

Identity and legal entities

No source reviewed states whether the US company was merged, dissolved, or remains a parent or subsidiary of the Japanese entity, or the date on which Nature Japan株式会社 was incorporated.

Programs, registrations and awards: selected for 500 KOBE ACCELERATOR (2017-08-14) and Google for Startups Accelerator Class 3 (2021-01-07); participated with Kansai Electric in the 平成29年度 virtual power plant demonstration (2017-07-25). iF Design Award 2020 for Nature Remo E (2020-02-05) and 2021 for Remo 3, Remo mini 2 and Remo E lite (2021-04-15); グッドデザイン賞 2024 for Nature Remo Lapis (2024-10-16); named in Forbes JAPAN's "次世代GX企業50選" energy-management category (2025-08-14). Retail electricity: the Electricity and Gas Market Surveillance Commission (電力・ガス取引監視等委員会) answered on 2020-11-04 that it had no objection to registering Nature株式会社 as a 小売電気事業を営もうとする者 (reply, applicant list); see Notes.

Market context as stated by the company

• The Series D release cites the government target of a renewable share above 50% of the power mix for 2050 carbon neutrality, and frames the need as raising self-consumption for users and flexible demand for grid operators (2024-02-07, 2024-06-27).
• Current postings cite GX policy and the development of the 需給調整市場 (balancing market) as "制度の追い風" (institutional tailwinds) (Backend Engineer posting).
• The company attributes the 2022 exit from electricity retail to JEPX procurement price spikes (LNG shortage, the war in Ukraine, an earthquake) (2022-04-11).
• ERAB Cybersecurity Guidelines Ver3.0 (revised 2025-05-22) made JC-STAR ★1 or higher mandatory for IoT devices used as ERAB control targets, which the company cites for its labels (2025-10-10).

Product

The site navigation groups products into ホームオートメーション (home automation) and エネルギーマネジメント (energy management), with a separate 法人のお客様 (business) section (nature.global; accessed 2026-10-11).

Product line-up

Discontinued: Natureスマート電気, a retail electricity service with prices that varied with supply and demand, launched in the TEPCO and Kansai areas on 2021-03-01, expanded nationally (except Okinawa and remote islands) by 2021-07-06, and stopped supplying power on 2022-06-30 (2022-04-11).

Commercialization

• Hardware is sold through the company's Shopify store, Amazon.co.jp, Rakuten and electronics retailers, with published list prices and volume pricing on request for businesses (business page; accessed 2026-10-11). Since 2026-10-01, Remo purchases on the official store, Rakuten and Amazon carry a refund guarantee if basic air-conditioner operation cannot be made to work (2026-10-01).
• Nature Green options are a mix of free and monthly paid options listed with prices on the Nature Green page (accessed 2026-10-11).
• B2B: the DR support service and commercial use of the Nature API are sold on enquiry; no price is published (API page). The developer portal permits corporations to use the API "商用利用前の検証段階に限り" (only at the pre-commercial validation stage), with commercial use handled by enquiry (developer portal). The EV Switch is also supplied as a module (EVSW-6B1-P) for Panasonic's "おうちEV充電サービス" (2026-03-10).

Reported scale over time

Announced customers and partners

Stated plans

• Series D use of funds: build the "Nature DER Platform" to control distributed energy resources, grow through partner companies (including investors), and hire (2024-02-07, 2024-06-27).
• Medium-term vision stated with the Nature Lock launch: "統合的なスマートホームの体験を提供し、快適でサステナブルな暮らしを実現する" (2026-04-21).
• The company deck's roadmap shows a "Nature V2H" and "Nature蓄電池" toward 2030, marked "想定のものであり、今後変更の可能性があります" (assumed, subject to change) (company deck).
• The Backend Engineer posting expects connected devices to pass 1,000,000 "数年で" (within a few years) (posting); the labour/general-affairs posting states the company is building internal systems "数年後のIPOを見据えて" (with an IPO in a few years in view) (posting, datePosted 2025-11-26).

Founder

塩出 晴海 (Haruumi Shiode) — founder, 代表取締役 CEO (company page, team page).

• Studied at Hokkaido University's engineering faculty, with an exchange at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; completed a Computer Science master's at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2008 (CEO interview (JA), team page).
• Mitsui & Co.: power-business investment and development in developing countries, including an Indonesian coal-fired power project (team page, CEO interview (JA)).
• Harvard Business School MBA, completed 2016; founded Nature while at Harvard, registering a company in the US in December 2014 (team page, CEO interview (JA)).
• Longer interviews: 立志編 (JA), 2025-12-04, 組織・カルチャー編 (JA), 2025-12-04.

大塚 雅和 (Masakazu Ohtsuka) — co-founder; listed as "Co-founder and CTO" in the company deck (modified 2026-05-31).

• Panasonic from 2000 (car-navigation firmware), Kayac from 2007, independent from 2013; built and sold the IRKit learning remote, then developed the first Nature Remo (interview, 2022-08-18 (JA), team page).
• Left Nature to work in Estonia after the Remo launch and returned in 2022 after about four years (interview, 2022-08-18 (JA)); wrote "7月からCTOに復帰しました" on 2023-07-19. The team page states he lives in Estonia.

Selected leadership

Names in this table are given as the romaji team page writes them. Technical advisors appointed 2019-11-17: 川崎 修平 (former DeNA director and CTO) and 阿部 力也 (Digital Grid Consortium); 宇野 雄 (Cookpad) became design advisor with the 2021-07-14 round. The engineering blog's first post (2021-04-29) was written by "Songmu", described as VPoE (post); Songmu is not listed on the current team page.

The team page lists software engineers working on firmware, mobile, server and SRE, plus hardware engineering, design, customer support, business development, HR, marketing/data analysis, product marketing and corporate roles (team page; accessed 2026-10-11). In December 2025 the company moved from four years of holacracy to a "Hybrid型組織", placing managers in functional circles while project circles stay holacratic (HR note, 2025-12-19 (JA)).

Funding

• The company first used a series label in the June 2024 release ("2024年2月より実施しているシリーズDラウンド"); its 2018, 2019 and 2021 releases use only 第三者割当増資, and no company source labelling any round as Series A, B or C was found.
• 環境エネルギー投資 invested in 2019, 2021 and 2024; 大和企業投資 in 2018 and 2021. The 2019 release states DeNA's holding was to move to Delight Ventures, which the deck now lists as "Delight Ventures（DeNA）".
• Crowdfunding (Kickstarter 2016, Makuake 2016, Indiegogo) is reported by the company as over 2000万円 in total and is not included in the table (2018-02-19).
• The 2024-02 round was announced with the "Nature DER Platform" plan; the 2021 round with entry into electricity retail and a design advisor appointment.

Statutory financial notices (決算公告)

Figures as transcribed from 官報 決算公告 by the 官報決算データベース (accessed 2026-10-11). Revenue is not included in the published notices.

Engineering

Technology stack and platforms

Confirmed by the company's technical writing and public assets:

• Backend: "ほぼすべてGo"; Node.js on Lambda and Cloud Functions (blog, 2021-04-29). The backend is a Go monorepo per the CTO (blog, 2026-07-31). Public Go repositories under natureglobal include firequeue (Kinesis Data Firehose queue) and realip.
• Cloud: AWS — ECS (Fargate), ALB, Aurora MySQL, ElastiCache Redis (cache and Pub/Sub), DynamoDB for time-series data, Kinesis Data Firehose, Glue/Parquet, Lambda, Amplify; Terraform; Datadog. Google Cloud Functions and Firebase for some integrations (blog, 2021-04-29, blog, 2024-04-02). An outage report names the AWS US-EAST-1 region and ECS Fargate (2024-07-31).
• Mobile: React Native and TypeScript for iOS and Android (blog, 2021-04-29), with native widgets (blog, 2022-12-06).
• Firmware: C on microcontrollers (blog, 2021-04-29); ESP-IDF, with unit tests run under Catch2 on a FreeRTOS POSIX port (blog, 2022-12-02); forks of esp-idf, esp-nimble and FreeRTOS-Kernel on GitHub. Two firmware engineers co-wrote 『基礎から学ぶ 組込みRust』 (blog, 2021-05-07).
• Device protocols: Wi-Fi, BLE, Wi-SUN (920MHz) for the smart-meter B-route, LTE-M (EV Switch), Matter (Remo nano), ECHONET Lite (Remo E2 release, EV Switch release, Remo nano release).
• Public API surface: HTTPS/JSON Cloud API at api.nature.global (OpenAPI 3.0.3), OAuth2 bearer tokens and an OpenID Connect provider; a Local API on the device discovered via Bonjour _remo._tcp (developer portal, Cloud API spec, Local API spec).
• Operations tooling: status page on Atlassian Statuspage (status.nature.global, response headers checked 2026-10-11); CI with GitHub Actions running Claude (Claude Code and the Claude API) to verify refactoring-only pull requests (blog, 2026-07-31).

Listed in current job postings (hiring evidence; accessed 2026-10-11):

• Backend: Go, AWS, Docker, ECS, MySQL (RDS), Redis (ElastiCache), CircleCI, GitHub, Zenhub, Slack (Backend Engineer).
• Firmware: C, C++ (C++17–C++23), Rust; Wi-Fi, BLE, LTE, Wi-SUN; HTTP, WebSocket, Matter, ECHONET-Lite; ESP32 series and ESP-IDF; Ubuntu hosts; GitHub Actions; LLM tools GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Devin, Gemini, NotebookLM (Firmware Engineer).
• Mobile: React Native, TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, Java; CircleCI (Smartphone App Engineer).
• The company deck lists AWS and GCP as clouds and ChatGPT, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Gemini, Devin and Cursor among AI tools (company deck).

Systems

Technical background sought

From current HERP postings (accessed 2026-10-11):

• Backend, required: server-side development in Go, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java or similar; development and operation of a web application at "中規模以上（目安ユーザー規模1万人）"; review and test culture; building applications including systems from zero; native-level Japanese; interest in IoT. Preferred: multiple AWS services, microservice-style distributed systems, OSS contribution, IoT product development, agile/scrum (posting).
• Firmware, required: embedded development in C and C++11 or later; TCP/IP and HTTP fundamentals; review and test culture. Preferred: IoT products, circuit design, web or mobile development, OSS, agile, Rust (posting).
• Mobile, required: iOS and Android apps integrated with a backend, at a similar scale. Preferred: backend development, React Native or Flutter, BLE device integration, OSS, agile (posting).
• Postings state that engineers currently share infrastructure, backend, mobile and embedded work and are expected to take tasks outside their main area when needed (Backend posting).

Industry domain

Japanese household energy: smart meters and the Wi-SUN B-route, ECHONET Lite device classes, JEPX spot prices, DR (behaviour-change and device-control, up and down), VPP and aggregation, the 需給調整市場, ERAB cybersecurity guidelines and JC-STAR, 特定計量制度, and national and Tokyo subsidy programs (GX志向型住宅, household battery and EV-charger subsidies) (2025-04-08, 2025-10-10, 2026-08-24). Energy-industry experience is required for the business-development role "012" and five or more years of energy-product sales for the sales role (BD posting, Sales posting); the engineering postings do not list energy-domain knowledge as required, and the engineering-intern posting lists interest in IoT products or power systems under 求める人物像 (posting). The company deck states 6% of full-time staff came from the energy industry (company deck).

Working conditions

Notes

Not publicly disclosed

Search scope for the findings below (2026-10-11): nature.global (sitemap index, WordPress REST API listing of 145 press releases and 180 notices), shop, terms, developer, swagger, status and engineering subdomains; HERP job board (15 postings); note and Speaker Deck accounts; GitHub organisations natureglobal, nature-global, natureinc, nature-inc, nature-remo and natureremo; NTA 法人番号公表サイト, gBizINFO, 電力・ガス取引監視等委員会 documents and 官報決算データベース; PR TIMES; BRIDGE, TechCrunch, Japan Dev; Japanese and English web searches for Nature株式会社, Nature Japan株式会社, Nature Inc. and product names.

• Revenue. Neither releases nor the 決算公告 transcriptions state revenue.
• Valuation, the amount from each investor, and any lead investor for any round, including the undisclosed 2024-06 JICN amount.
• Retail electricity registration details. The 2020-11-04 commission documents confirm the application; the METI registration number, registration date and any later withdrawal were not found in the reviewed sources (the METI register page returned HTTP 403 to automated access).
• The US company's legal relationship to Nature株式会社, and the incorporation date of Nature Japan株式会社.
• Engineering headcount. Only percentages are published (software engineers 38%, hardware engineers 6% of full-time roles in the deck).
• Equity for employees. Not mentioned in current HERP postings; Japan Dev's unverified profile lists an "Employee stock option plan".
• Published SLA. A public status page exists; no SLA or uptime commitment was found.
• Open source. The natureglobal organisation (name "Nature Inc.", email info@nature.global, created 2018-04-19) has 19 public repositories, of which 8 are original and 11 are forks; the most recent push to an original repository is firequeue (2024-07-31). A fork of teslamotors/fleet-telemetry was created 2026-04-28. nature-remo is a separate "Nature Remo Community" organisation with no stated company link.

Inconsistencies across sources

• Founding date: "2014年12月10日" (company page; also in releases from at least 2022-04-11); "2015年にハーバード大学発ベンチャーとして設立" (2019-08-01 release); US registration in December 2014 (CEO interview). The fiscal year ended 2026-03-31 is labelled 第11期 in the 決算公告 (官報決算データベース); researcher inference: this numbering is consistent with a first fiscal period ending in March 2016, not December 2014.
• Headcount: 56 including contractors and interns (company page; Undated); 50 including interns and contractors (HERP company box; Undated); 45 employees (deck, modified 2026-05-31); 32 insured persons at the HQ office in the social-insurance data shown by gBizINFO (date of the figure not shown). The scopes differ.
• Capital: "25.8億円（資本剰余金含む）" (HERP, deck) versus 資本金 "5000万円" in the PR TIMES company box (accessed 2026-10-11). The first includes capital surplus; the second does not say.
• Unit counts: over 800,000 for the Nature Remo series alone (2026-06-18, 2026-10-01) versus 800,000 for Remo and Remo E combined (deck, modified 2026-05-31) versus "累計70万台" for consumer sales in the Business Development posting (datePosted 2022-03-18; accessed 2026-10-11).
• CTO role: the team page heads 大塚's entry "CTO" but says "現在はソフトウェアエンジニア。エストニア在住"; the deck says "Co-founder and CTO … 現在はソフトウェア全般を統括する"; his 2023-07-19 post says he returned to the CTO role in July 2023.
• Working language and hours: Japan Dev's unverified, undated profile says "We don't require Japanese skill for developers", lists core hours 11:00–17:00, a ¥30,000 commuting cap and a Tokyo location (Japan Dev; accessed 2026-10-11); the current Backend posting requires native-level Japanese, has no core time, a ¥80,000 cap, and a Yokohama office.

Other

• Electricity retail entered and exited. Natureスマート電気 ran from 2021-03-01 to 2022-06-30; the company then said it would focus on DR, ZEH and EV energy management (2022-04-11). The DR support service began with Kansai Electric in summer 2022.
• Outages. On 2024-07-08 a write surge on the time-series database took down the API servers, followed by mass reconnections; on 2024-07-31 an AWS ECS Fargate incident in US-EAST-1 broke WebSocket connections (2024-07-11, 2024-07-31). The company named server-independent control as its priority; local control shipped for Remo Lapis on 2025-02-12 and for Remo 3 and Remo mini 2 on 2025-03-18.
• Overseas sales. The company planned Remo sales in the US, Australia and Singapore from late September 2020 (2020-09-16); TechCrunch reported a US and Canada launch of Remo 3 and that the team had made monthly trips to factories in Shenzhen before the pandemic (TechCrunch, 2020-09-23). en.nature.global redirected to the Japanese site on 2026-10-11; no current statement on overseas sales was found.
• Discontinued integrations: IFTTT (2023-12-13) and the Nature user community (2024-04-01).
• Publishing surfaces. The company runs an engineering blog on Hatena (latest post 2026-07-31; earliest 2021-04-29), a note account with staff interviews, and a connpass group whose most recent event was 2023-07-19. The API reference and OpenAPI files are public.

Resources

Official

• Corporate site (JA) · company page · mission · business page · Nature API business page
• Press release index
• Careers · team · job list · interviews
• HERP job board — Backend Engineer, Firmware Engineer, Smartphone App Engineer, Product Manager, Business Development, Business Development (energy), Sales (energy management), Labour/general affairs, Recruiter/CEO assistant, Intern, Engineering intern
• Developer portal · Remo E API · Cloud API spec · Local API spec
• Nature Green · Terms and policies · Status page
• Engineering blog (JA) · note (JA) · company deck on Speaker Deck (JA) · connpass · GitHub organization

Press releases and notices (nature.global, JA — newest first)

• Air-conditioner operation guarantee — 2026-10-01
• Smart EV charging for Tesla — 2026-09-24
• Tokyo household aggregator registration — 2026-08-24
• Air-conditioner guarantee campaign, Nature Learn — 2026-06-18
• Nature Lock general sale — 2026-04-30
• Nature Lock and Nature Key announced — 2026-04-21
• EV Switch individual sales — 2026-03-10
• ISO/IEC 27001 — 2026-03-09
• Setagaya demonstration results — 2025-12-25
• EV Switch launch — 2025-10-31
• JC-STAR ★1 — 2025-10-10
• EV remote charging demonstration — 2025-09-04
• Forbes JAPAN GX 50 — 2025-08-14
• DR support service renewal — 2025-07-01
• Nature Remo E2 — 2025-04-08
• Tokyo Gas DR support service — 2025-04-02
• Local control for Remo 3 and mini 2 — 2025-03-18
• EV Switch and Panasonic — 2025-02-25
• Local control for Remo Lapis — 2025-02-12
• Shizen Connect partnership — 2024-10-30
• Good Design Award — 2024-10-16
• Outage report — 2024-07-31
• Outage cause report — 2024-07-11
• Nature Remo Lapis — 2024-07-05
• Series D total 12.2億円 — 2024-06-27
• auエネルギー＆ライフ — 2024-06-26
• Kansai Electric year-round DR — 2024-06-25
• Tokyo Gas alliance — 2024-04-18
• User community closure — 2024-04-01
• ドコモでんき自動エコモード — 2024-03-04
• 10.2億円 funding — 2024-02-07
• IFTTT integration ended — 2023-12-13
• Nature Green paid option — 2023-08-08
• Nature Remo nano — 2023-07-04
• Octopus Energy DR — 2023-02-13
• NTT Docomo DR — 2022-12-23
• Kansai Electric DR — 2022-06-28
• Natureスマート電気 closure — 2022-04-11
• 7.5億円 funding — 2021-07-14
• Natureスマート電気 nationwide — 2021-07-06
• 300,000 units, iF Design Award 2021 — 2021-04-15
• Natureスマート電気 launch — 2021-03-01
• Google for Startups Accelerator — 2021-01-07
• Paid corporate Remo E API — 2021-01-05
• 200,000 units, overseas plans — 2020-09-16
• Nature Remo 3 — 2020-08-05
• Nature Remo E lite — 2020-04-28
• iF Design Award 2020 — 2020-02-05
• Nature Remo E preorders — 2019-12-10
• Technical advisor 川崎修平 — 2019-11-17 · technical advisor 阿部力也 — 2019-11-17
• 5億円 funding — 2019-08-01
• 1億円 funding — 2018-02-19
• API published — 2018-02-01
• Nature Remo on sale — 2017-10-16
• 500 KOBE ACCELERATOR — 2017-08-14
• VPP demonstration — 2017-07-25
• Kickstarter US$50,000 — 2016-06-03

Engineering blog and interviews (JA)

• Technologies behind Nature Remo — 2021-04-29
• Embedded Rust book — 2021-05-07
• FreeRTOS + Catch2 — 2022-12-02
• Native widgets in React Native — 2022-12-06
• Staged firmware release CLI — 2022-12-09
• WebSocket ECS graceful shutdown — 2023-07-19
• firequeue — 2024-04-02
• AI-verified refactoring auto-merge — 2026-07-31
• CEO interview, 立志編 — 2025-12-04 · 組織・カルチャー編 — 2025-12-04
• Hybrid organization — 2025-12-19
• 大塚 interview — 2022-08-18

Registers, filings and third-party coverage

• NTA 法人番号公表サイト — 4130001055679 (JA)
• gBizINFO (JA)
• 電力・ガス取引監視等委員会 — reply, 2020-11-04 (JA) · applicant list (JA)
• 官報決算データベース — 決算公告 transcriptions (JA)
• PR TIMES — release with company box, 2026-10-01 (JA)
• BRIDGE — Series D total 12.2億円, 2024-06-28 (JA)
• TechCrunch — Remo 3 in the US and Canada, 2020-09-23
• Japan Dev — company profile (unverified)