Hakuhodo DY Ventures

President and CEO Yoshiaki Akimoto leads the investment team, supported by Deputy President and COO Daisuke Urushiyama, who serves as Managing Partner. The investment committee draws on Akimoto's two decades inside Hakuhodo and Urushiyama's prior partnership at an external VC. Day-to-day execution falls to a 14-person team of principals, associates, and analysts who are almost all career Hakuhodo employees seconded into the unit.

Origination runs through the parent holding company's agency network, which touches most major Japanese advertisers and their digital ecosystems. The fund also runs a formal catalyst program that places senior Hakuhodo executives — categorized under AI, Creative, Media, and Business Development — into portfolio companies, creating a feedback loop where agency client demand surfaces investment targets. Two confirmed IPOs from the portfolio in the past 16 months suggest the sourcing pipeline is producing underwriting-trackable outcomes.

It is a wholly-owned strategic CVC. The firm's sole LP is Hakuhodo DY Holdings, and the investment team members are employees on rotation from Hakuhodo group agencies. Financial return is expected — two portfolio IPOs in 2025–2026 demonstrate that — but the primary mandate is to capture technology and business-model innovation that the parent advertising group can monetize through commercial alliances.

No. The firm operates a single direct-investment vehicle, the HAKUHODO DY FUTURE DESIGN FUND. All disclosed activity — over 70 companies as of mid-2026 — is direct equity investing. There is no evidence of fund-of-fund commitments or LP stakes in third-party vehicles.

The fund invests from seed through late-stage, with a pronounced concentration in early-stage and growth-stage Japanese technology companies. Portfolio company maturity spans from pre-revenue AI startups to companies filing IPOs on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, giving the firm the flexibility to follow companies as they scale into commercial partnerships with Hakuhodo agencies.

The fund's investment policy names three thematic buckets: technology that creates new consumer touchpoints, data-valuation and service-implementation in unstructured data, and platforms that optimize allocation of social assets including people, goods, and information. Confirmed portfolio companies map to enterprise SaaS, digital health, fintech, creator economy, agritech, and logistics — all sectors where marketing spend, data analytics, and creative services create immediate commercial synergies for the parent group.

The team runs adjacent to — and sometimes inside — Hakuhodo DY Holdings' internal incubation engine. Director Kazuma Furumai also heads the holding company's Incubation Business Strategy Office as of April 2026. Associate Takashi Shimizu concurrently serves as a director for two Ventures of Creativity spin-outs, ZETTAI WORKS and Diwa AI, while several other team members participate actively in the Ventures of Creativity selection committee. This dual-lens structure means the CVC sees both external deal flow and the parent's internal startup pipeline, which can create unique co-investment or acceleration opportunities.