F Ventures

Gaku Yoda, the founder and managing partner, leads investment decisions. He operates from the firm's Tokyo and San Jose offices and is the primary point of contact for founders and co-investors. The firm's lean structure means Yoda is directly involved in sourcing, diligence, and portfolio support.

The firm sources through a bilateral Japan–US network. In Japan, it draws from the Fukuoka startup ecosystem, Tokyo-based accelerators, and university labs. In the US, the San Jose office scouts Y Combinator and 500 Global batches for Japanese founders and co-investment syndicates. The firm also runs periodic demo days that surface proprietary referrals from its LP base.

F Ventures focuses on direct seed and early-stage equity investments. There is no public record of the firm making LP commitments into other venture funds. Its model relies on originating and leading rounds, occasionally co-investing alongside domestic and US micro-funds.

The firm writes initial checks at the seed and pre-Series A stage, with follow-on capacity into Series A. Typical initial investment size ranges from $100,000 to $500,000. The firm prioritizes companies that have a product prototype and some early user traction, rather than pre-product ideas.

The firm does not publicly publish a sector exclusion list. However, its portfolio concentration in enterprise software, AI/ML, fintech, and digital health suggests it avoids hardware-intensive, capital-heavy sectors like semiconductors, biotech lab-stage therapeutics, and heavy industrial automation.

Most Japanese VC firms invest from a single Tokyo office and treat global expansion as a portfolio-company responsibility. F Ventures embeds US market entry into its fund operations, maintaining a San Jose office and requiring English-language readiness from founders. This makes it function closer to a cross-border accelerator with a fund vehicle.

The firm's LP base reportedly includes Japanese corporates that use the fund for innovation scouting and US exposure. While F Ventures is not a formal CVC, the alignment between its US-entry thesis and corporate LP interests creates a de facto scouting function that some allocators treat as a substitute for building an in-house CVC team.