AT PARTNERS

AT PARTNERS

AT PARTNERS was founded in 2018 by Nobuyuki Akimoto and Jun Tosabayashi, two operators who had each built and run corporate venture capital units inside Japanese corporations before deciding the standard CVC model was too slow and expensive for most companies. Akimoto had established a US research lab in Silicon Valley and launched its first CVC, while Tosabayashi brought cross-border M&A and startup operating experience from both the US and Japan. Their insight was that Japanese corporations needed exposure to Israel’s concentrated pool of AI, cybersecurity, and digital-health startups, but individual CVC efforts were failing to reach enough of them efficiently. The firm raises capital from a consortium of Japanese corporate partners and deploys it as a fund of funds into a handpicked group of Israeli venture capital managers. AT PARTNERS targets early-stage technology companies across artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, IoT and sensor networks, digital health, and cybersecurity — all sectors where Israel produces globally competitive startups at a high rate. The firm’s proprietary data platform, ATDB, ingests granular startup information to power competitive analysis and partner selection on behalf of its corporate LPs. AT PARTNERS does not make direct investments itself; the model ensures that each corporate partner gains visibility into a far larger startup pipeline than it could build on its own. AT PARTNERS operates from a single office in the Aoyama district of Tokyo with a six-person team as of mid-2026. The partnership includes CTO Noriyo Koyama, a former top-ranked systems engineer at a major US big-data analytics firm, and CBDO Masaki Arimoto, who joined in 2021 to lead business development between overseas startups and Japanese enterprises. The firm’s venture partner, Hiroshi Baba, covers sourcing across the US, Southeast Asia, and Europe alongside the core Israel focus. While AT PARTNERS does not disclose its total assets or committed capital, the structure makes it a conduit for corporate Japan’s open-innovation budgets rather than a standalone asset-gathering vehicle. AT PARTNERS’ structural oddity is that it functions less like a conventional fund-of-funds manager and more like an outsourced innovation department for multiple Japanese corporations simultaneously. By concentrating commitments into top-tier Israeli VC funds and coupling them with a live startup-intelligence platform, the firm turns what would otherwise be a passive LP relationship into an active corporate-development workflow — without requiring each corporate partner to hire its own deal team.