HeyMax’s first exposure to the Japanese market was at WiT Japan 2025 where he met Lu Dong, founder of TakeMe, a booking portal for Japan’s top restaurants. The two startups sealed a partnership agreement which allowed HeyMax customers to earn miles when dining at TakeMe’s restaurants.
The restaurants get the inbound traveller’s spending and the customer gets miles to redeem on HeyMax’s loyalty platform.
Since then, Joe Lu, co-founder and CEO of HeyMax, has seized upon a bigger opportunity – and this one came to him, rather than the other way round.
As he sees it – Japan’s population is declining. For large corporations whose revenue is a direct multiplier of that population, the arithmetic is straightforward and sobering. The inbound traveller – younger, higher-spending, increasingly diversified beyond any single source market – represents one of the few genuinely expanding growth vectors.
“The bigger the company, the more they’ve already optimised in all sorts of domains,” he explains. “So, they now need to look for new growth, and they really feel like the inbound traveller is the core growth segment right now.”
What surprised Lu even more was the speed and proactivity with which Japanese corporations are acting on this. JR East, the railway giant whose network forms the backbone of domestic travel across Japan’s Kanto region, didn’t wait for HeyMax to come knocking.
Its venture team found HeyMax at the JTC Launchpad in Singapore, going building to building, researching startups, and reaching out directly.
The partnership model is simple. Japanese merchants, whether JR East ticketing, restaurant chains, or convenience stores, want to attract foreign visitors.
Asking those visitors to download a Japanese-language loyalty app is, in Lu’s words, “too much work for too little outcome”.
HeyMax solves this by making its own currency, MaxMiles, the reward for inbound customers, who are already familiar with it. A Japanese merchant can now offer that currency directly, marketing to a foreign audience through a single platform partnership rather than trying to build multi-country reach from scratch, he says.
“Merchants’ willingness to pay, to advertise, to increase their attractiveness to foreigners is on the rise and very unmet,” Lu says, adding of course that HeyMax intends to meet that need.
Joe Lu will be joining us at WiT Japan for the Startup Innovation Showcase as well as a session called Purpose, Influence, Loyalty: What Really Drives Us?, where we’ll explore what really drives travellers today and what will matter most in the next 20. Get your tickets now.
