Minerva Growth Partners

Decisions are led by co-founders Kei Nagasawa and Kensuke Murashima, supported by the broader Minerva-Pleiad partnership. Nagasawa brings the operating lens from his tenure as Mercari's CFO; Murashima contributes two decades of tech investment-banking experience from Morgan Stanley. Michael Yoshino and Kenneth Lee, the co-founders and co-CIOs of Pleiad Investment Advisors, are also MGP founding partners and participate in investment-committee and deal-sourcing processes.

Minerva Growth Partners was founded in 2020 as a co-venture with Pleiad Investment Advisors, a Hong Kong SFC-licensed asset manager established in 2014. Pleiad's founders serve as MGP founding partners, delivering the public-market perspective that supports the firm's private-public crossover strategy. Pleiad can invest in MGP portfolio companies at IPO and beyond, while MGP itself focuses on pre-IPO and late-stage private capital.

The firm writes minority growth checks of ¥1-3 billion as its core, but it also executes management buyouts, PIPE transactions, and carve-outs of tech businesses or subsidiaries. This buyout capability is specifically aimed at listed companies whose management teams feel constrained by short-term public-market expectations.

MGP routinely co-invests alongside other venture and growth-equity firms in Japan. For example, its 2025 investment in Caddi's Series C extension and its 2026 NOT A HOTEL Series C round were done alongside existing venture backers. The firm's own disclosures emphasize partnership with management rather than control, suggesting it is comfortable in syndicated rounds.

MGP has not published a formal exclusion list, but its stated focus is consumer internet (B2C) and software and services (B2B), including health-tech and fintech. It has no announced investments in heavy industry, hardware, traditional manufacturing, or life sciences outside digital health.

All public portfolio evidence indicates the firm makes direct investments only — it has not disclosed any fund-of-funds allocations or LP commitments to other managers. Its structure as a direct growth-equity and buyout platform aligns with that approach.

MGP is organized as an asset manager, not a family office. It raises capital from external institutional investors — roughly 60 percent overseas LPs in Fund I, according to its September 2021 announcement — and deploys it into a portfolio of Japanese growth-stage companies.