Mercari

Mercari was founded in Tokyo in February 2013 by Shintaro Yamada, who leads it as CEO, and launched its marketplace app that July. It has been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 2018.

The Mercari app lets people sell things they no longer need to each other. According to its FY2026 impact report, the marketplace handles more than 1.2 trillion yen of goods a year and has about 24 million monthly users in Japan and 4.2 million in the United States. Around it the group runs the Merpay payment service and Mercard credit card, the Mercoin crypto exchange and the Mercari Hallo app for short-term work, and it owns the Kashima Antlers football club.

The same report counts 2,065 employees, about a third of them foreign nationals. The group works from Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Palo Alto and Bengaluru, where it opened an engineering centre in 2022. Its backend runs as Go microservices on Google Cloud and Kubernetes, and the team writes about its systems on the Mercari Engineering blog and publishes tools on GitHub.