taliki

Founder and CEO Kazuki Nakamura leads all investment decisions, often serving as the first institutional board member for portfolio companies. The firm maintains a flat structure with Nakamura as the central decision-maker, supported by a small team of analysts and venture partners drawn from Kyoto University's research community (per the firm's official communications).

taliki sources primarily through deep ties to Kyoto University's engineering and medical research labs, where the firm has cultivated relationships with faculty founders since 2015. The firm's geographic concentration in Kansai gives it early visibility into hardware and deep-tech teams that rarely appear in Tokyo pitch decks — many of taliki's portfolio companies first emerged from university spinout programs or regional maker communities.

taliki has no stated exclusion list, but its portfolio history shows no exposure to consumer internet, gaming, Web3, or crypto assets. The firm's focus remains tightly bound to enterprise software, AI/ML applications, industrial technology, and digital health — areas where technical defensibility and long development cycles favor patient institutional capital over momentum investing.

Through Taliki Lab Kyoto — a co-working and incubation space opened in late 2023 — the firm provides pre-seed and seed-stage companies with physical workspace, prototyping resources, and access to its network of Kyoto University researchers and Kansai manufacturers. This incubation layer operates separately from the fund's investment vehicle, but serves as both a sourcing funnel and an operational support backbone for existing portfolio companies.

Kyoto's economy is dominated by precision manufacturing, traditional craft industries, and academic research output — not financial services or consumer tech. taliki's thesis contends that technical founders in Kansai are structurally underserved by Tokyo venture capital, creating a pricing and access advantage. The firm treats Kyoto's combination of engineering talent and lower capital competition as the core of its strategy, comparable in ambition to regional deep-tech funds in places like Cambridge, UK or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.