NEXTBLUE

All four partners — Kanako Inoue, Vincent Tan, Yuichi Kori, and Saki Oshima — sit on the investment committee and evaluate every deal. The firm states that it convenes investment-review meetings on a per-case basis, which allows rapid decision speed. Inoue and Tan both spent years at BCG and at the IDEO-linked venture firm D4V before founding NEXTBLUE.

For pre-seed and seed-stage startups, the firm offers a pre-investment business-development phase. The NEXTBLUE team interviews multiple startup-friendly prospective customers alongside the founding team to locate initial customer candidates. Only after that validation does the deal go to the investment committee.

The portfolio divides into two named groups: Japan, and US & Europe. On the Japanese side, holdings such as INFORICH (Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market, 2022) and SPACER sit alongside consumer and SaaS companies. The US/Europe names, including Eli Health, Bloomlife, and Teal Health, almost all concentrate on women's health.

The firm positions NEXTBLUE Fund II as Asia's first fund committed to women's well-being, and its disclosed US/Europe portfolio is nearly entirely women's-health or family-health companies. However, the Japanese-side portfolio also includes enterprise-software companies like Rocket's, Secure Navi, and the developer-tool Gitbutler, as well as food and direct-to-consumer brands such as Kencko and fufu.

Post-investment, the firm provides follow-on fundraising support — introductions to angels, strategic corporates, and other VCs for the same round or the next round. It also offers hands-on sales, marketing, PR, recruitment assistance, KPI-setting frameworks, and cloud credits of up to 10 million yen across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Many LPs are operating corporations, not purely financial institutions. NEXTBLUE leverages this by organizing regular events connecting corporate LPs with portfolio companies, effectively creating a startup-friendly enterprise community that can serve as early customers or channel partners.

The firm invests from pre-seed through early stage. Its published ticket range goes up to a few million dollars. NEXTBLUE also states that it can provide follow-on investment in subsequent rounds alongside fundraising introductions to other external investors.