MPower Partners

The general partners — Kathy Matsui, Yumiko Murakami, and Miwa Seki — set strategy and make investment committee decisions. Each came from a senior financial or policy role: Matsui was vice chair of Goldman Sachs Japan, Murakami headed the OECD Tokyo Centre, and Seki was a portfolio manager at a large asset manager.

Flow leans heavily on the partners’ institutional and governmental relationships inside Japan, supplemented by external advisors including Tadashi Yanai and J. Michael Evans. The WPower sidecar fund creates an additional proprietary channel into women-led startups, a demographic segment that mainstream Japanese VCs underserve.

It is a registered venture capital firm, not a family office. The GPs manage pooled third-party capital through two fund vehicles — MPower Partners Fund II (middle-to-late stage, Japan and global) and WPower Fund (early stage, Japan) — rather than a single-family balance sheet.

MPower does direct venture and growth-equity deals, writing checks from its own fund vehicles. The firm does not market itself as a fund-of-funds, and the disclosed portfolio shows only operating-company positions.

Fund II targets middle to later stages, while the WPower vehicle concentrates on early-stage companies. In practice the firm has backed seed-stage startups such as Mantra and later-stage companies like EdgeCortix, spanning the full venture lifecycle.

WPower Fund focuses on early-stage companies headquartered in Japan that are founded by women or deliver products and services that empower women. It sits inside the same management company but operates as a distinct vehicle with its own investment committee pipeline, directly reflecting the GPs’ public commitment to ecosystem diversity.

The firm’s public materials do not describe a formal co-investment club, though its network of external advisors — including sitting CEOs and former Goldman leadership — suggests capacity for syndication. The firm has not published a dedicated co-investment vehicle, and institutional allocators typically negotiate co-investment rights bilaterally.