Building the best environment for the growth and success of startups

Joi Ito

Co-Founder and Board Member, Digital Garage

Joichi Ito is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is on the board of CCC and Tucows. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies.

Kaoru Hayashi

Representative Director, President Executive Officer and Group CEO, Digital Garage, Inc.

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and President of Digital Garage since November 2004. Digital Garage is an Internet based incubation company. Chairman of Kakaku. com since June 2003 and Chairman and President of Open Network Lab, Inc. since 2012. Involved with incubation of Internet based business

Shonosuke Hata

Kakaku.com Representative Director and President

Born in 1974. After graduating from college and working at JT (Japan Tobacco), he joined Kakaku.com in 2001. He was in charge of negotiating partnerships and alliances between advertising agencies, e-commerce players, and shopping malls. He also led the automobile insurance, broadband, telecommunications, and financial departments. He has been a Special Advisor to Open Network Lab since April 2015.

Atsuhiro Murakami

Kakaku.com Director

Atsuhiro Murakami received a BA in Economics from Keio University in year 1997. Atsuhiro was in charge of corporate reformation and IT promotion for many large japanese corporations. In March of 2005, Atsuhiro founded “Tabelog,” which is now the largest gourmet site. Since April of 2009, Tabelog started subscription business for restaurants. Atsuhiro is still currently the director of Tabelog Division and continues to run the business. Since September 2011, he is also a Special Advisor to Open Network Lab, Inc.

Shingo Yuki

Kakaku.com Director

Born in 1975. After graduating from college, he entered Itochu Techno-Solutions Corporation. As a Systems Engineer, he participated in the construction of internet service infrastructure for mobile phone carriers. Entered Kakaku.com in March 2004. From May 2006, he became the Head of Brand Marketing Division and was in charge of the large-scale renewal in October 2007. Currently, he is responsible for management of the site’s shopping contents. An expert in clean SEO, which does not harm usability, he also supports the site’s overall SEO. Since September 2011, he is also a Special Advisor to Open Network Lab, Inc.

Kotaro Chikashige

Chief Director of Tabelog PR Marketing Division

After experiencing building 2 startups when he was in college, he joined Kakaku.com in 2010. He led Tabelog subscription business for restaurants, mainly in charge of building sales strategy and business plan. Since 2017, as a head of PR/marketing division, he is responsible for creating branding strategy in marketing management.

Tomoyuki Watabe

General Manager of Business Development Division and Manager of Kinarino Department

Tomoyuki Watabe joined Kakaku.com in 2011, mainly in charge of subscription business for restaurants and individual users. In 2014, he launched lifestyle media “Kinarino”, accelerated its growth to become a website with 1,000+ unique visitors per month in less than 3 years. Currently, he is managing Kinarino, and many other Kakaku services.

Phil Libin

Cofounder and CEO, All Turtles

Phil is cofounder and CEO of All Turtles, a new AI startup studio working to use artificial intelligence to solve everyday problems. He is a cofounder of Evernote and is its former Chief Executive. Phil is a Senior Advisor at General Catalyst and board member of the companies he invested in while serving as Managing Director for the company. Previously, Phil founded and served as president of CoreStreet, which was acquired by ActivIdentity (now owned by HID Global) in 2009.

Nils Johnson

Co-founder, Beautylish

Nils Johnson is an investor, entrepreneur, and a mentor for Y Combinator. He started his career at Bergdorf Goodman, selling for Calvin Klein. From the world of fashion, he went on to finance at Deutsche Bank. From there, he went on to found an international telecom company, Gorilla Mobile.

Janice Fraser

LUXr Co-founder

Janice is a serial entrepreneur and UX designer. During her 15 years in Silicon Valley, she has raised capital, founded both successful and failed startups, consulted to both large enterprises and early stage firms. Janice was cofounder of design firm Adaptive Path and served as the company’s first CEO. During her tenure, Adaptive Path tripled in staff and revenues, developed and sold a product to Google.

Matthew Romaine

Founder, Gengo

Born in Boston, with an American father and Japanese mother. Lived in North America, London, and Tokyo. Returned to Tokyo after graduating from Stanford University, and founded the translation platform Gengo, to further his ambition of supporting the globalization of Japan. He sometimes tweets at「@quanza」.

Sahil Jain

AdStage, Inc. Founder

Dropping out once from high school at 17 to join Yahoo! Mobile, then again from UC Berkeley at 19 to join AOL to work on M&A. Afterwords, he co-founded Y Combinator and SV Angel backed, Trigger.io. Since leaving Trigger, he is currently working on his new startup, AdStage, an all-in-one advertising platform. Sahil is also a mentor for 500 Startups, Inc., where he shares his expertise in the gaming industry as well as the mobile web and app distribution.

Andrew Johns

Director of Growth & Revenue at Wealthfront

Andrew Johns is currently Director of Growth & Revenue at Wealthfront. One of the original members on both Facebook and Twitters’ user growth and engagement teams, Andrew later moved to Quora, where he was product manager of user growth, working on such projects as logged out conversion rate testing, email, onsite merchandizing, new user experience, contact importing and invite systems, and other projects focusing on active user growth. Andrew have also spent a few years as a Consultant or Advisor for startups like Insidr.net, ShopWell.com, Altius Education, and several others.

Teruhide Sato

Founder, BEENEXT

Teruhide Sato participated in founding the Japanese subsidiary of US payment company Cyber Cash (now VeriTrans) while he was in Keio University SFC. In 2000, he takes the post of President CEO of netprice, Ltd. (currently BEENOS Inc). In 2008, the World Economic Forum elected Teruhide as a “Young Global Leader”. Currently, he supervises eleven subsidiary as Group CEO and leads the entrepreneurs in BEENOS portfolio companies in e-commerce/online-payment business.

Hiro Maeda

Managinng Partner, BEENEXT

Hiro Maeda is a partner at BEENEXT, an early stage venture capital firm investing in India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the U.S. With a degree in computer science and economics from Bucknell University, he has been an early stage investor in over 100 companies, including Everlane, Instacart, and Anyperk. Previously, he led the investment division at BEENOS. In 2010, he launched Japan’s first startup accelerator, Open Network Lab, in partnership with Digital Garage and Kakaku.com. Hiro was selected as one of the 2016 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 in the finance and venture capital category. Notable investments include Instacart, Kamcord, FundersClub, Everlane, Lob, Screenhero (acquired by Slack), Pixelapse (acquired by Dropbox), Fril, Anyperk, Qiita, and many more.

Koichiro Yoshida

CrowdWorks Inc.　President, CEO

After graduating Tokyo Gakugei University, Mr. Yoshida worked at Pioneer and Reed Exhibitions, before becoming a corporate officer at Drecom, where he successfully conducted an IPO. In 2011, he established CrowdWorks, Japan’s first crowdsourcing service. By raising over one billion yen in funds from VCs, including Digital Garage, Crowdworks has currently become one of the most eminent startups in the Japan.

Taichiro Motoe

Bengo4.com, Inc. President, CEO
Authense Law Offices Lead Lawyer

Graduated the Faculty of Law, Keio University of Law in 1998, and passed the judicial examination in 1999. He then registered as a lawyer (Daini Tokyo Bar Association) in 2001, and entered Anderson Mori & Tomotsune law office, where he practiced M&A and finance law, amongst other corporate law. In 2005, Mr. Motoe established his own private law firm, Authense Law Offices. In the same year, he established Bengo4.com, Japan’s first legal aid portal website. He is also the author of several law-related books.

Naofumi Tsuchiya

GoodPatch. Inc. CEO

The founder of GoodPatch. Inc., a Tokyo-based UI design company. After his career as a web director, he flew to San Francisco, in 2011, to join btrax Inc, a web design, marketing and research branding a web consulting business, where he conducted events such as SF New Tech Japan Night, and also ran support for Japanese companies expanding into foreign markets. In the same year, he returned to Japan to start Goodpatch, a company specialized in UI planning and design. Soon after launch, he provided UI design to Gunosy, playing a big part in their successful business expansion. Since then, he has worked with new operations of large companies and startups, not just aiding in UI, but the product design, as well.

Mutsumi Ota

Chief Executive Officer
giftee Inc.

After graduating from Keio University, Mutsumi joined Accenture to work on government projects as a system engineer. In August 2010, he founded giftee, a casual gifting service.

Shota Horii

Co-Founder Fablic, Inc.

Born in Kyoto, 1985. Began his career in VOYAGE GROUP, inc., where he experienced establishing multiple companies. After fulfilling the role as CEO of subsidiary companies, Zucks, Inc. and adingo, Inc, he co-founded Fablic, Inc. in April 2012.

Shoji Miyata

Founder
SmartHR, Inc.

Founder and CEO of SmartHR, Inc., which operates SmartHR. Winner of TechCrunch Tokyo 2015 and B Dash Camp 2016. After being diagnosed with a disease that affects 1 in 100,000 people, Shoji was able to receive treatment and become fully cured because of the social insurance system in Japan. The appreciation felt during that time of need has led him to create SmartHR, a service centered around solving social insurance issues, three years afterwards during Open Network Lab’s 10th Batch Seed Accelerator Program.

Tetsuro Nakamura

Executive Officer and Manager of Strategy Department

After graduating from Keio University’s Faculty of Economics, Tetsuro worked in launching new business at a startup offering IT-based distribution support services, as well as at a major entertainment company. He joined Kakaku.com, Inc. in 2007 and helped launch Tabelog. Today his work spans strategies in the food service field and new businesses.

Tomoya Sasaki

Tomoya joined Digital Garage in 2005. Engaged in the strategic business of Digital Garage Group. Engaged in localization of overseas investee services in Japan and joint venture business with partner companies. He led the expansion of Twitter in Japan when the capital and business alliance was signed. He joined in the seed accelerator program Open Network Lab from the beginning, and is currently working as an evangelist. Developing the incubation business mainly based on the experience of Twitter's user growth in Japan and business collaboration between the investee and the Digital Garage Group.

Naoki Sato

Naoki participated in the Seed Accelerator Program and started a company when he was a graduate student at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Afterwards, he worked in new business establishment, fundraising, company sales, and other fields at GREE, Inc. and a Fintech startup. In Open Network Lab, he is involved in accelerator program planning, as well as startup investment and management support.

Yushi Segawa

Yuji was involved in robotics and AI research through graduate school, then started working in April 2006 at Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc. in government policy and new business consulting for the private sector. From May 2015, he was at the in-house startup of a major audit firm where he supported domestic and overseas startup growth and new business creation by major companies. He joined Digital Garage, Inc. in June 2019.

Nobuyuki Matsuda

Nobuyuki jointly founded a startup offering a communication platform for tutoring schools when he was a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. He gained experience at Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc. in consulting for private-sector new business strategies, as well as new product and service development, from April 2008. In recent years he also provides open innovation support including startups, major companies, local governments, etc.

Momoe Ariyama

Momoe was involved in launching Twitter as part of its expansion into Japan in 2009, working in content planning, news coverage, editing, and social media management. Afterwards, she was involved in new in-house businesses before moving into customer success and product sales (hands-on work at the investee of a subsidiary’s investment division). She has operated the Open Network Lab Office since 2015.

Yuya Furukawa

Yuya has started two companies in Japan and Thailand. He joined Onlab because of an interest in accelerators that partner with entrepreneurs. As the startup success manager, whose goal is discovering and resolving growth bottlenecks experienced by startups, his main tasks are startup support content development, business progress chart management, and mentoring. His fields of expertise include project management, managing campaigns for hypothesis verification, digital marketing using the Internet and CRM, and online product design.

Daisuke Hara

Daisuke passed the Certified Public Accountant Examination after graduating from Keio University in 2005. He has worked at Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC since 2007, where he is involved in auditing various tasks in the financial, manufacturing, and other industries. He went to Silicon Valley in 2012, where he spent two years helping three American companies with their stock market listings. Since 2015, he has been CFO of a consulting company that utilizes real estate big data, and of a chemical recycling company that uses garbage as a raw material. In addition to equity, he is also well versed in various fundraising methods such as debt and subsidies. His cumulative fundraising total is more than nine billion yen. He joined DG in November 2019.

Ken Covey

Ken focuses on overseas investments and hands-on support for Onlab's portfolio companies. He also provides localization support for overseas investments, and serves as a conduit to the resources, network and know-how of Digital Garage Group.

Prior to Open Network Lab, he worked as a management consultant in New York and Tokyo, where he helped companies with go-to-market strategy, and competitive analysis.

Ken holds a BBA in Finance and International Business from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kazuyuki Nakane

After majoring in marketing for the sports apparel industry at Portland State University, Tomoyuki gained digital marketing experience at Nike Japan. In Open Network Lab, he currently provides support to startups in the seed stage, and works in open innovation by startups in the middle to late stages, as well as major companies in the real estate and construction industries.

Ayumi Ichimura

After graduating from Keio University, Ayumi engaged in the launch and operation of new services and the management of portal media at a communications venture.
She Joined Digital Garage in 2011 and was in charge of launching and operating various services at Marketing Technology Company. After that, she joined Open Network Lab from 2015 and enagaged in program management. In addition, she is also in charge of localization and hands-on work such as sales and customer success, of overseas services' expansion in Japan as well as management of co-working space.

Akane Arai

After working for a publisher and an advertising agency, Akane gained experience as a web designer and accounting for small companies, units, and startups. Joined Unou Co., Ltd., later Zynga Japan, in 2010 and enageged in human resources, recruiting, accounting, general affairs, office relocations, public relations, and production of corporate site. After that she led the planning, development, and production of web services and smartphone applications with over 3 million people registrations..
Joined Digital Garage in 2012. Since January 2016, she has been in charge of design related work and startup support for Open Network Lab. She left once and joined again from April 2020.

Hazuki Inata

Joined Digital Garage after experiencing production management and studio management at an advertising company. At an editorial department of「twinavi」from Twitter, Hazuki was in charge of SNS operations, customer support, and content planning and editing. At Open Network Lab, she is now responsible for the management of the Seed Accelerator　administrative office and the incubation space.

Kota Shiratani

General Manager, Kyujin Box Business Division, Kakaku.com, Inc.

After graduating from university, he worked for a major HR service company where he was in charge of a wide range of operations including sales, marketing, and business planning. He joined Kakaku.com in 2014 and launched "Kyujin Box", a job search service, in 2015. For the next 6 years, he was responsible for expanding and monetizing the service and grew it to become Kakaku.com's next major business after Tabelog.

Yozo Takamatsu

Kakaku.com Inc. Executive Officer, Travel Business Division General Manager
Time Design Co., Ltd. Founder Director

Yuzo Takamatsu received a BA in Environment and Information at Keio University in 2003 and joined a consulting firm. He founded Time Design Co., Ltd. in 2006, where he launched a solution for hotels to combine real time hotel and airline rates ; which is called "Dynamic Package". This method to provide travel was almost unheard of in the world at that time. In 2014, Time Design has joined the Kakaku.com group as a subsidiary. Yuzo has spread the solution to global, and later launched a payment solution for hotels with the understanding of the hotel & travel industry. In parallel, he has also been involved in other ventures outside of the travel industry as founder or director. In April 2022, he joined Kakaku.com as Executive Officer and Travel Business Division General Manager, responsible for the overall travel field.

Toshiya Tabata

After graduating from the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, he was engaged in new game development at a game company. After that, he studied design at Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design and Royal College of Art/Pratt Institute, and did design consulting at BIOTOPE Inc. while he was in school. After graduation, he worked in business development at a healthcare startup, and in new business development and organizational development consulting at NTT Data Management Institute. Currently, he is in charge of investment and management support in the BioHealth field as a program director of Open Network Lab BioHealth.

Tsuyoshi Sato

Tsuyoshi Sato joined DG Ventures in April 2021. He started his career at real estate developer COSMOS INITIA as a sales representative for newly built condominiums. After that, he joined econtext Digital Garage company, where he was in charge of corporate sales and business development. In 2015, he was transferred to DG Financial Technology(formerly Veritrans) , where he was in charge of promoting strategic alliances, acquiring major merchants, online/offline payment solution sales, KPI management, and launching inside sales and customer success teams. He graduated from Yokohama National University, and majored in Civil Engineering.

Yusuke Sonoda

Yusuke Sonoda joined Digital Garage in April 2018 after graduating university and was in charge of planning, digital marketing planning, proposal and direction at the Marketing Technologies Segment. Provided businesses in a variety of industries with end-to-end marketing scenarios and solutions that integrate the digital and the real world. In 2021 joined Open Network Lab and is in charge of mentoring, etc., utilizing the knowledge he has cultivated in digital marketing.

Yoshiki Chijiwa

Yoshiki joined DG Incubation in April 2021. He started his professional career at Digital Garage group in October 2018 after graduated from San Francisco State University with bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He engaged in digital advertising agency business especially for mobile app at Marketing Technology Segment, Performance Marketing Department, Application Marketing Division, where he was involved in about 30 top-ranked Japanese mobile apps including both game and non-gaming categories. As an ad operations consultant, he was in charge of a wide range of business including creating advertising proposal and advertising planning, directing operation members, operating some major advertising platforms by himself, and communicating with mobile advertising platform partners.

Yamashita Hikari

Hikari joined Open Network Lab in 2021. She started her professional career after graduating from Kyoto Prefectural University, worked in development sales and marketing at a medical startup. Realizing the importance of marketing, she worked in sales at a print media company and in web advertising management in the marketing segment of Digital Garage. While focusing on SNS ad operations and web promotion design, she was in charge of the operations team and was responsible for team composition and member management.

Yuki Yoshida

Yuki joined Open Network Lab in 2021. She started her career graduating from a technical college, she joined a beauty products distributor and worked as a sales support and beauty dealer. After that, she joined GERRNING Co., Ltd. in 2020 and worked at Pangaea Cafe as a operations staff, and also at store and co-work space. At Open Network Lab, She is in charge of community manager, program management, and back-office operations.

Madoka Kuribayashi

Madoka joined Open Network Lab in December 2020. She is in charge of program operations. After graduating from high school, she studied abroad in the United States. After returning to Japan, she spent several months in Europe, mainly in Italy, and later joined an Italian luxury brand company, where she was in charge of Retail assistant.