Quollio Technologies is a Tokyo-based SaaS company tackling enterprise data governance. Its platform — the Quollio Data Intelligence Cloud, evolved from the original Quollio Data Catalog — provides data cataloguing, data-lineage visualisation and metadata management, with cross-search that makes data assets discoverable across an organisation. By turning scattered, siloed data into a governed and usable asset, Quollio helps enterprises put their data to work for analytics and AI. The company was founded in 2021.

Ryota Matsumoto

Takahiro Sanada

Website

Quollio Technologies

Every large company in Japan can tell you how much data it has. Very few can tell you what all of it means.

Ask a simple question inside a global manufacturer, such as how much inventory is sitting offshore right now, and the answer depends on who you ask. One business unit counts stock when it ships. Another counts it when it lands. A third recognises revenue on a different date again. Each system is correct on its own terms. Put them side by side and the numbers disagree, so somebody opens Excel and reconciles them by hand.

That somebody used to be the bottleneck. Increasingly, it is an AI model. And unlike the analyst who has worked there for fifteen years, the model has no idea that &ldquo;inventory&rdquo; means three different things in three different divisions. It simply guesses.

This is the problem Quollio Technologies was founded to solve.

<h2>Rich in data, short on context</h2>

Over the past decade, Japanese enterprises have invested heavily in moving their data to the cloud. Warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery now sit alongside decades of ERP systems, and dashboards in Tableau and Power BI sit on top of both. Storage is no longer the constraint.

Understanding is. What a table contains, who owns it, how a column was calculated, whether it can be trusted, which report it feeds: this information about data, its metadata, usually lives in people's heads, in scattered spreadsheets, or nowhere at all. When a key employee moves on, the knowledge goes with them.

For years this was an expensive inconvenience. In the age of generative AI it has become a strategic one. Large language models are remarkably capable, but they reason only from the context they are given. Point an AI agent at a warehouse full of cryptically named tables and it will produce confident answers built on definitions it has invented. The quality of enterprise AI, in other words, is capped by the quality of enterprise metadata.

<h2>Auditors who saw the problem first</h2>

Quollio's founders met the problem in its purest form: as auditors.

CEO Ryota Matsumoto, a graduate of Osaka University's economics faculty, worked in audit data analytics at KPMG AZSA, where he helped build company-wide data analysis infrastructure. Co-founder, Executive Vice President and COO Takahiro Sanada, who holds a master's degree in applied physics from Waseda University, worked alongside him as a data scientist after years as a systems engineer and analytics consultant.

Audit is the discipline of asking whether a number can be trusted, and tracing it back to its source. Again and again, the two found that the hard part was not the analysis. It was working out what the data actually meant before any analysis could begin.

They founded Quollio in Tokyo in August 2021 with a mission to connect the world's information and knowledge to drive new value creation, captured in the company's tagline: Connect the dots. Weave values. CTO and VP of Product Yoshinori Tahara now leads the product, and the team has grown to one where roughly 45% of employees are global talent.

<h2>One metadata layer for people and AI</h2>

Quollio's platform, the Quollio Data Intelligence Cloud, gives an enterprise a single place to collect, organise and govern its metadata. It connects to the systems companies already use, including Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Teradata, Tableau and Power BI, and builds a shared catalog of what every dataset is, where it came from and who is responsible for it. Governance, lineage and data quality sit in the same place rather than in separate tools.

Three design choices set it apart.

First, it is built for how Japanese enterprises work. The interface, workflows and support are designed around Japanese business practice and language, and properties can be configured to each organisation, so business definitions, not just technical ones, can be captured. New features such as the Metadata Lifecycle Manager, launched in March 2026, are aimed at a practical goal: keeping metadata current without placing an unsustainable burden on frontline staff.

Second, it is vendor-neutral. Quollio does not sell a data warehouse, an ETL tool or a BI product of its own, so it has no reason to steer customers towards any particular stack. That neutrality matters in large organisations where every division has made different technology choices.

Third, it is built for AI as well as people. In August 2026, Quollio made its MCP server generally available, using the Model Context Protocol so that AI tools such as Claude, Gemini CLI and Microsoft Copilot Studio can read and update catalog metadata in real time. An agent can look up what a table means before it queries it, draft descriptions for new data sources for a data steward to approve, or flag unused assets for archiving. The catalog stops being documentation people occasionally consult and becomes context that AI uses every time it works.

Matsumoto describes the shift directly. In his 2026 New Year message, he wrote that the central question for enterprises is no longer whether to use AI, but how to evaluate it, how to trust it, and how far to entrust it with judgment. His answer is to redefine Quollio as &ldquo;a textbook for AI&rdquo;: the trusted body of business knowledge that AI learns from before it acts.

To help companies get there, Quollio launched Quollio INTEGRAL in February 2026, a professional services offering that runs from data and AI governance strategy through implementation and metadata enrichment, to proof-of-concept work that measures how much better AI answers become when metadata is in place.

<h2>From pilots to production</h2>

The customer list shows how far the idea has travelled. Quollio is used by companies including KDDI, Hakuhodo Technologies, ENEOS, Epson, Fuji Yakuhin, Infomart and Yanmar.

Yanmar, which runs agricultural, construction, marine and energy businesses worldwide, is a clear example. Its business units each ran their own systems, data formats differed, and some teams reconciled figures manually in Excel. Yanmar adopted Quollio to improve global supply chain management and to build a data foundation that AI can interpret. Definitions such as revenue recognition timing and categories like offshore inventory are now documented as metadata, so analysts in its first division to go live can run production, sales and inventory analysis without ambiguity. Yanmar cited a domestic vendor with an intuitive interface, clear pricing that does not grow with usage, a rich API for AI integration, and hands-on support from planning to rollout.

Independent research points the same way. According to ITR's Market View: DBMS/BI 2026, published in January 2026, Quollio ranked second by revenue share in Japan's data catalog market in fiscal 2024 and is forecast to hold that position in fiscal 2025, and is forecast to rank first in both the manufacturing and the information and communications sectors.

Quollio has also built a partner network that reaches deep into Japanese enterprise IT. NTT DATA signed a solution partner agreement in April 2025, positioning metadata as a way to improve the speed and quality of AI agent-driven work. Teradata Japan, NEC and, in October 2026, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions have followed, with NEC and Quollio completing technical validation of a context layer that manages machine learning features alongside their business meaning.

The company has raised more than &yen;1 billion to date, including a &yen;750 million Series A in June 2024 led by DNX Ventures.

<h2>Where Vertex Ventures Japan comes in</h2>

Three things drew us to the company.

The first is timing. Every large company in Japan is now under pressure to put generative AI to work, and almost every one of them is discovering the same obstacle: AI cannot use data it does not understand. Metadata management has moved from a back-office hygiene task to the foundation of enterprise AI, and Quollio was already there when the market arrived.

The second is fit with the Japanese market. Global catalog tools exist, but large Japanese enterprises buy differently, operate differently and document their businesses in Japanese. A product designed from the start for that reality, with a partner network that includes NTT DATA and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions, has a structural advantage that is hard to copy.

The third is what the platform accumulates. Each customer that documents its business definitions in Quollio is building a structured record of how the company actually works. As AI agents increasingly read from and write to that record, it becomes harder to replace and more valuable over time.

<blockquote>

&ldquo;AI is only as good as the context it is given. Quollio has built the metadata layer that Japanese enterprises trust, and is now connecting it directly to AI agents. We are proud to back Ryota and the team as they make Japan's data ready for AI.&rdquo;

Naonori Kurokawa 

General Partner 

Vertex Ventures Japan

</blockquote>

Vertex Ventures Japan backs founders building companies that solve hard problems in Japan and matter globally. Quollio's problem is not unique to Japan. Every enterprise in every market that wants to trust its AI will first have to explain its business to it.

Quollio intends to be where that explanation is written.

For more information on Quollio, visit: 
https://quollio.com/

Teaching AI the Language of Business: How Quollio Is Building Japan's Metadata Layer

OPERe is a healthcare-DX startup on a mission to become the communication hub between patients and care providers. Its flagship product, Poke-sup (ポケさぽ), runs on patients' own smartphones, tablets and LINE to streamline the repetitive explanations and intake interviews that consume clinical staff time. By accompanying patients across their care journey with videos and messages, Poke-sup eases the administrative burden on medical teams while improving patient understanding and engagement. Founded in 2020, OPERe also provides services to pharmaceutical and medical-device companies.

Yuka Sawada

OPERe

She had spent years on the other side of it. As a clinical nurse, she had answered the call button hundreds of times a shift, walking corridors to deliver a glass of water, adjust a pillow, explain again what tomorrow's procedure would involve. Now she was the one lying in the bed, and she found she could not bring herself to press it.

&ldquo;I feel bad calling the nurse every time,&rdquo; Yuka Sawada remembers thinking.

It is a small moment, the kind that passes unremarked in hospitals every day. But Sawada, then working as a hospital management consultant, recognised something structural inside it. Outside the ward, she communicated through LINE, email and Slack, asynchronously, at whatever moment suited her. Inside the ward, there was exactly one channel: the nurse call. Urgent and non-urgent requests travelled the same wire, interrupting the same overstretched person. As she later put it, the problem was that hospital communication &ldquo;had become disconnected from the way we communicate in everyday life.&rdquo;

In June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, she founded OPERe to close that gap.

<h2>The arithmetic no hospital can escape</h2>

Japan is the world's most aged society, and its healthcare system is absorbing the consequences first. More patients arrive each year with more complex conditions, while the clinical workforce that serves them grows tighter. Since April 2024, overtime caps on physicians have made the constraint explicit: the hours simply are not there any more.

Hospitals have responded by digitising records. Electronic medical record systems are near-universal in Japanese acute care. But records are only half of what a hospital produces. The other half is explanation, and it has remained almost entirely manual.

Consider what happens before a single operation. A patient must understand the procedure, the risks, the anaesthetic, the fasting rules, what to bring, when to arrive, who may visit. A nurse or doctor delivers this by speaking it aloud, often to an anxious person who will retain a fraction of it, then repeats it to the family, then repeats it again by telephone the following week. The same explanation, given hundreds of times a year, by the most expensive and scarcest labour in the building.

Then the information has to come back the other way. Medical history, allergies, medications, questionnaires, consent. Handwritten on paper in a waiting room, transcribed by staff into the electronic record, stored in a cabinet somebody must later retrieve.

None of this is a technology problem in the conventional sense. It is a communication problem that happens to be extraordinarily expensive.

<h2>From the ward, to consulting, and back again</h2>

Sawada's route to founding a company began with a manga. As a junior high school student she read one whose protagonist was a nurse, and decided that was the work she wanted. She trained and practised as a clinical nurse at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo.

What she encountered there was both the meaning of the work and its severity. Rather than leave healthcare, she moved upstream, joining a hospital management consulting firm because, in her words, she wanted &ldquo;to build an environment where my colleagues could work with vitality.&rdquo; Consulting gave her the second half of an unusual education: not only what a ward feels like at 3am, but how hospital operations, budgets and IT decisions are actually made.

Her own hospitalisation supplied the third piece. The company she founded took its name from that diagnosis: OPERe, for renewing the operations of care. Its stated purpose is to use technology to remake how healthcare organisations run, so that medical services can be sustained and improved rather than merely rationed.

And it carries a conviction from her nursing years that shapes the product to this day: &ldquo;the people who think most about the patient are their own doctor and nurse.&rdquo; OPERe was never designed to replace that relationship with software. It was designed to give it back the time it needs.

<h2>Meeting patients where they already are</h2>

OPERe's platform, Pokesapo, begins from an unglamorous but decisive insight: the app you do not have to install is the app everybody uses. Rather than asking patients to download hospital software, Pokesapo runs on LINE, alongside in-facility tablets for those who prefer them.

A patient scans a QR code at the hospital. From that point, Pokesapo delivers explanations against the patient's own timeline. Admission guidance, examination preparation, surgical briefings, sent as video and PDF at the moment each becomes relevant, in the patient's own home, at a pace they control, as many times as they need to watch it. Nobody has to be interrupted for the fourth viewing.

The channel runs in both directions. Medical history and pre-consultation questionnaires can be completed from home rather than on a clipboard in a waiting room, with automatic reminders for anyone who has not finished, multilingual support for patients who need it, and output that flows into the hospital's existing electronic record rather than sitting in a silo. In February 2026, OPERe added AI Window, a retrieval-augmented generative AI layer that answers the routine questions patients ask at all hours, drawing only on that specific facility's own explanatory materials, with data held in Japan to satisfy Japanese healthcare governance requirements.

The design discipline throughout is worth noting. AI Window does not improvise medical advice; it answers from the hospital's own approved content. Pokesapo does not ask a hospital to rip out its record system; it feeds it. This is software built by someone who knows how quickly clinical staff abandon a tool that adds a step.

<h2>Delivering information is not the same as being understood</h2>

The harder problem, and the one OPERe has increasingly organised itself around, is verification. A hospital can prove it handed over a leaflet. It cannot usually prove the patient understood it, which is precisely what informed consent, safe discharge and treatment adherence all depend on.

Because Pokesapo delivers explanation digitally, it can also observe it: what was watched, what was left unopened, what was answered, where a patient stalled. That turns explanation from an event into a measurable loop, and it turns consent from a signature into something closer to evidence.

The results the company reports point the same way. Pokesapo is now deployed at more than 130 medical institutions across Japan, concentrated in acute-care hospitals and obstetrics and gynaecology departments, with patient satisfaction above 95% and operational improvement reported by 92% of adopting facilities. Those two numbers rarely move together. Most healthcare software improves the institution at the patient's expense, or the reverse. OPERe's own framing for this is sanpo-yoshi, the old Japanese merchant principle that a transaction should be good for all three sides.

<h2>Becoming infrastructure</h2>

A communication layer is only as useful as the systems it can reach, and OPERe has spent the last two years connecting outward rather than building alone.

In March 2024 it entered a capital and business alliance with Seiko Epson, pairing Pokesapo with Epson Connect to bridge the reality that Japanese hospitals still run on a mixture of smartphones and paper. It has integrated with Gakken Medical Clip to widen its library of patient explanation video. And in June 2026 it opened a proof-of-concept with Seiko Solutions, linking Pokesapo to the Compact In electronic consent service so that a patient can scan a QR code and complete legally compliant electronic consent entirely inside LINE, with no separate app, no additional login, and no paper form for anyone to file or retrieve.

Each of these makes the same argument. OPERe is not trying to own a feature. It is trying to become the place where communication between a hospital and a patient happens, whatever the underlying system. Sawada has been explicit that the ambition extends beyond the hospital wall, towards connecting hospitals with pharmaceutical and medical device companies, whose information currently reaches clinicians and patients through channels barely changed in decades.

<h2>Where Vertex Ventures Japan comes in</h2>

Vertex Ventures Japan invested in OPERe's &yen;400 million Pre-Series A round in June 2025, alongside JAFCO Group and DNX Ventures, with the capital directed at in-hospital communication features and deepening the engineering team.

Three things drew us to the company.

The first is founder-market fit of a kind that cannot be manufactured. Sawada has stood at the bedside, sat in the hospital boardroom, and lain in the bed. Healthcare is unforgiving of software designed from the outside; the graveyard is full of elegant tools that assumed a clinician had thirty spare seconds. OPERe's product decisions consistently reflect someone who knows they do not.

The second is that the market is not waiting for permission. Japan's demographics, the physician overtime caps and the operational pressure on acute care are not forecasts. They are current conditions, and they make patient communication a budget line rather than an aspiration.

The third is what the company is quietly accumulating. Every explanation delivered and understood inside Pokesapo builds a record of how patients actually receive medical information, at what moments comprehension fails, and which materials work. That is a genuinely difficult asset to replicate, and it compounds.

<blockquote>

&ldquo;Most health tech digitises records. OPERe digitises understanding, and then verifies it, at the exact moments a patient's care depends on it. In a system carrying more patients with fewer clinicians every year, that closed loop is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation of the communication hub every hospital will need.&rdquo;

Naonori Kurokawa 

General Partner 

Vertex Ventures Japan

</blockquote>

Vertex Ventures Japan backs founders turning hard domestic problems into companies of global relevance, and few problems are more exportable than this one. Japan is simply first to a demographic position that Korea, Taiwan, China and much of Europe are approaching. A system that has worked out how to care for more patients with fewer clinicians, without asking either side to accept less, will have built something the rest of the world eventually needs.

OPERe describes its goal as becoming the communication hub between patients and healthcare providers, and its purpose more simply still: to make medicine that truly gets through the new normal in society.

It began with a nurse in a hospital bed, deciding not to press a button.

For more information on OPERe, visit: 
https://www.opere.jp/

The Nurse Call She Didn't Want to Press: How OPERe Is Rebuilding Communication Between Patients and Hospitals

Tride is a deep-tech startup commercialising full-colour monolithic micro-LED technology, built on nitride-semiconductor research from Professor Iwaya's laboratory at Meijo University. Founded in 2025 and backed by UTEC, the company is developing next-generation displays that go 'beyond the pixel,' bringing together semiconductor and LED veterans from ROHM, Toyoda Gosei and beyond. Its ambition is to light up the future of displays with high-performance, full-colour micro-LEDs integrated monolithically on a single chip.

Tatsuhito Sakamoto

Hironori Miyauchi

Koji Okuno

Motoaki Iwaya

Tride

Every screen we look at, from the phone in our pocket to the panel in our car, rests on display technology that has changed remarkably little in principle over the past two decades. Vertex Ventures Japan has invested in Tride Inc., a deep-tech startup working to change that, with a technology that reaches beyond the pixel as we know it.
<h2>The promise, and the problem, of micro LED</h2>
Micro LED has long been regarded as the display technology of the future. It offers what every display maker wants at once: higher brightness, deeper contrast, greater energy efficiency, and a far longer lifespan than the OLED and LCD panels in use today.
Yet one obstacle has held the entire category back: color. Producing a full-color micro LED display has traditionally meant growing red, green, and blue emitters from different materials, then transferring millions of microscopic chips onto a single panel. This mass-transfer step is slow, costly, and difficult to scale, and it has kept micro LED out of reach for most mainstream applications. Solve color, and the format finally opens up.
<h2>A different approach: full color from a single chip</h2>
Tride's answer is monolithic full-color micro LED. Rather than assembling a display from three separately manufactured color chips, Tride generates red, green, and blue on a single continuous semiconductor structure. The color is built into the device itself, removing the need to transfer individual color chips one by one.
The approach is rooted in years of nitride-semiconductor research and attacks precisely the bottleneck that has constrained the whole industry. Fewer process steps, tighter pixel densities, and a clearer path to manufacturing at scale.
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
Monolithic micro LED matters most where today's displays fall short. In augmented and virtual reality, it enables displays bright enough to use outdoors and dense enough to sit just millimeters from the eye. In wearables and automotive applications, it offers efficiency and durability that current technologies struggle to match. And as displays continue to shrink and grow more pixel-dense, an architecture that does not depend on transferring individual chips becomes not merely cheaper, but essential. This is foundational technology, not an incremental upgrade.
<h2>A team built for hard technology</h2>
Tride brings together a founding team with exactly what deep tech demands: world-class research paired with deep industry experience. CEO Tatsuhito Sakamoto spent eight years at ROHM Semiconductor's Silicon Valley office serving major technology companies, and leads strategy and ecosystem building. COO Hironori Miyauchi, a University of Tokyo Ph.D. with experience at QD Laser and GITAI, oversees business development and operations. CTO Koji Okuno, a Nagoya University Ph.D. formerly at Toyoda Gosei, brings deep R&D experience across blue LEDs, laser diodes, and micro LED. Anchoring the science is CSO Prof. Motoaki Iwaya of Meijo University, a globally recognized authority in nitride semiconductor devices, who leads joint research and IP strategy.
<h2>The Vertex view</h2>
Tride is exactly the kind of hard-tech, long-horizon company Vertex Ventures Japan was built to support: turning frontier Japanese research into globally relevant businesses. We are proud to back the Tride team, and excited for the journey ahead.

Lighting Up the Future: How Tride Is Solving Micro LED's Hardest Problem

Gaianixx is a University of Tokyo deep-tech spinout reinventing how semiconductors are made. Using its proprietary Multi-functional Interlayer (多能性® 中間膜), the company achieves the multi-layer single-crystallisation of epitaxial films long considered difficult across the industry, producing high-quality single-crystal epitaxial wafers regardless of crystal, functional or substrate material. Its core 'Martensite Epitaxy' technology — enabled by the fusion of Material, Machine, Method and Members ('M4') — targets MEMS, power devices and LED products.

Kento Nakao

Takeshi Kijima

LinkedIn

Gaianixx

Vertex Ventures Japan (VVJ) has invested in Gaianixx Inc., a University of Tokyo deep-tech startup, as a new investor in the company's Series C first round. The round raised a total of ¥2.0 billion, bringing Gaianixx's cumulative funding to approximately ¥3.85 billion.
The financing was completed through a third-party allotment of shares to existing and new investors. New participants alongside VVJ include the Mitsui Kinzoku-SBI Material Innovation Fund II, Toray International, and Kiraboshi Capital. Existing backers — University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), JX Metals, JIC Venture Growth Investments (JIC VGI), Alconix, i-nest Capital, and SMBC Venture Capital — also participated, with JIC VGI leading the round.
<h2>Solving a structural trade-off in semiconductors</h2>
Gaianixx's core technology, the proprietary "Multi-functional® interlayer," relaxes the lattice mismatch between a substrate and the crystal film grown on top of it, enabling high-quality single-crystal films across dissimilar materials. The company positions the technology as a way to resolve the long-standing "cost-versus-performance trade-off" in compound semiconductors, with applications spanning next-generation sensors, communication (SAW) devices, power semiconductors, LEDs, and optical-communication components.
Since its Series B, Gaianixx has moved from technology validation into commercialization. It has completed "design wins" with two companies now advancing to device development using its materials, and is fielding joint-development and evaluation inquiries from close to 40 device makers in Japan and abroad.
<h2>Use of proceeds</h2>
The new capital will fund the full-scale operation of Gaianixx's Yamanashi Technical Center and its proprietary pilot line for large-scale sample supply and process verification; global business development across North America, Europe, and Asia, together with expanded hiring of mass-production process engineers and business-development and IP-strategy professionals; and further strengthening of its intellectual-property portfolio. Gaianixx currently has 12 patents granted — 11 covering its core Multi-functional® interlayer — and 87 applications pending in Japan and overseas.
<blockquote>"We are delighted to take part in this financing. Gaianixx's core Multi-functional® interlayer technology realizes the single-crystallization that the compound-semiconductor industry has long sought, and holds the potential to become a platform technology for a compound-semiconductor market worth well over ten trillion yen. Having walked alongside the company since its earliest days, we feel its feasibility growing by the day. By fusing the team's deep technical expertise and semiconductor start-up experience with the global ecosystem of the Vertex Group, we will contribute to Gaianixx's growth and to innovation across the compound-semiconductor market."Naonori Kurokawa General Partner Vertex Ventures Japan</blockquote>
<h2>About Gaianixx</h2>
Founded in November 2021 and based at the University of Tokyo (Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo), Gaianixx Inc. develops, manufactures, and sells Multi-functional® interlayer and epitaxial technologies under the mission of "renovating the world with the Multi-functional® interlayer." The company is led by CEO Kento Nakao.

Vertex Ventures Japan Backs Gaianixx in ¥2 Billion Series C First Close

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HEARTBEATS is a Tokyo-based startup driving the fan engagement business in sports and entertainment, centered on its digital trading card platform. Founded in November 2017, the company plans, develops, and operates applications that let fans collect, trade, and engage with content from Japanese professional baseball teams, horse racing, and other entertainment properties, under the mission "Be the Heart that Moves the World."

Yuta Umesawa

HEARTBEATS

Vertex Ventures Japan (VVJ) has invested in Heartbeats, a Tokyo-based startup that builds digital trading card platforms for sports and entertainment fans. The fund recently participated in Heartbeats' US$15 million fundraising.
Founded in November 2017, Heartbeats plans, develops and operates apps where fans can collect, trade and play with digital cards. Its catalogue spans professional baseball players, characters from the sci-fi hero Ultraman, sumo wrestlers and a growing list of other figures and characters, all in service of its mission, "Be the Heart that Moves the World."
<h2>Taking Japanese content to a global audience</h2>
Heartbeats reflects a thesis that runs through VVJ's portfolio. Japan has real strengths in deep technology and entertainment content, but its startups have often stayed focused on the domestic market, and the country has produced far fewer unicorns than the US or China.
<blockquote>"Japan undoubtedly has an edge in deep technology and entertainment content. What's missing is global access."Takashi Tomita Managing Partner Vertex Ventures Japan</blockquote>
VVJ aims to help close that gap by drawing on the wider Vertex and Temasek network. The team can arrange introductions between its portfolio companies and the businesses that Temasek owns or invests in, and give founders a clearer view of which products and services are in demand overseas. Vertex Ventures Japan is part of the global network of funds supported by Vertex Holdings, which is owned by Temasek.
<h2>About Vertex Ventures Japan</h2>
Established in 2024, Vertex Ventures Japan has invested in eight companies to date, including wireless power charging startup PowerWave and semiconductor materials producer Gaianixx. The firm plans to invest in about 20 companies through its inaugural fund of 10 billion yen, or roughly US$64 million.
Beyond entertainment content and deep technology, VVJ sees growing demand for semiconductor technology and materials as artificial intelligence advances. It is also looking at software and data-service startups that streamline operations in industries such as finance, real estate and healthcare.
This announcement draws on an exclusive interview with Takashi Tomita published by WSJ Pro on October 1, 2026.

Vertex Ventures Japan Invests in Heartbeats, the Digital Trading Card Platform for Japanese Sports and Entertainment