Questions

Kyorabo is an iPhone app for finding research collaborators. You build a profile describing your field, topics, career stage, what you are looking for and what you can offer. Kyorabo then shows you other researchers whose profiles line up with yours, and opens a conversation when the interest runs both ways.

Researchers and students: PhD and master’s students, postdocs, faculty and principal investigators. The app also recognises research staff, industry professionals, experts and funders as collaborator types you can look for or present yourself as.

Kyorabo reaches the App Store on 30 August 2026, as version 1.0 for iPhone. It is built from one codebase that also targets Android and the web, but that release is the iPhone one.

Kyorabo is free to use. The free plan includes a full profile, discovery, mutual matching, private conversations with every match, and research opportunities, with a limit of ten connection requests a day.

Kyorabo Premium removes that daily limit and adds advanced discovery filters, a priority profile highlight and a Premium badge. It is ¥1,200 a month or ¥7,000 a year on the Japan App Store, both with a three-day free trial, and other regions are priced equivalently in local currency.

There is no advertising and no ad SDK in the app.

A one-time purchase of ¥16,000 that never renews, limited to the first 30 people who buy it. The app shows how many places are left and stops offering the plan once they are gone. Monthly and yearly remain available either way.

Through your App Store account settings, like any other subscription. Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the next renewal.

Deleting your Kyorabo account does not by itself cancel an App Store subscription. Cancel it in the App Store as well.

No. A private conversation can only start after both people have independently expressed interest. Until that happens there is no way for anyone to send you a message.

Joining a topic room makes you visible to that room’s members and opens its group chat. It does not let anyone message you privately; that still needs a mutual connection.

Your research fields, interests and keywords, your collaboration goals, what you can offer, your preferred collaborator types, availability and spoken languages. You can narrow discovery further with filters at any time.

Seniority, institution ranking and citation counts are not matching signals.

Swiping right registers interest. Swiping left passes, and that person stops appearing in your deck. Both are reversible with the undo control, and you can save a profile to revisit without expressing interest at all.

The app can show profiles imported from a public laboratory directory, clearly labelled as unclaimed. They are there so a new deck is not empty. You can save them, but you cannot like or message them, because the person has not joined Kyorabo.

Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, GitHub, and a personal or laboratory website. All of them are optional.

No. Onboarding has eight steps and most are optional. Once the required identity, affiliation, research field and goal fields are filled you can finish and start discovering, then strengthen the profile whenever you want.

Yes. Discovery visibility is a setting you control, and discoverable profiles are shown only to signed-in Kyorabo members. Email addresses are never shown.

No. Kyorabo does not sell personal information and does not use profile or message content for third-party advertising. The app declares no tracking and contains no advertising identifier.

There is optional usage analytics, off unless you turn it on under You. When enabled it sends limited anonymous product-interaction events to PostHog in the European Union, identified per installation. It never includes your account ID, profile content, search terms, messages or filenames, and there is no session recording.

Open You, scroll to the account menu and choose Delete account. This permanently removes your profile, matches, messages, chat attachments, opportunities and uploaded profile image from active Kyorabo systems.

Every profile, opportunity and conversation carries a menu with report and block options. Blocking removes that person from your discovery, matches, opportunities and chat, and prevents future matching.

Safety reports are reviewed as soon as possible, with a target initial response within 24 hours.

No. Kyorabo does not guarantee a person’s identity, credentials, funding or collaboration claims. Verify anything important before relying on it.

The interface ships in English and Japanese, switchable at any time, across the whole app including the legal and support screens.

Separately, you can list the languages you speak from a set of seventeen, including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Sinhala, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu. Those are matching preferences, not interface translations.