Jim Adler, founder and general partner at Toyota Ventures, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2025 Powerlist.
“My pivot into venturing happened when I was at Toyota Research Institute leading the data engineering team,” says Jim Adler of Toyota Ventures. “Having previous entrepreneurial and operating experience, I was interested in returning to the startup world. This coincided with Toyota’s plans for setting up a venture fund.”
Adler founded Toyota Ventures, the Japanese carmaker’s first early-stage VC firm, in July 2017. “I wanted to keep three key stakeholders top of mind when we started the firm – our startups, our Toyota corporate partner and the Toyota Ventures team. The firm was intentionally structured to put the founder first as our primary customer.”
Adler has leveraged his experience in selling enterprise software and refers to Toyota Ventures as “an enterprise product team”. He says, “It begins with understanding the needs of our customer, the startups we invest in, and providing them with a valuable, delightful ‘product’ experience – respecting their process, operating at their speed and aligning with their financial goals.”
“We may be in an AI hype cycle right now, but I believe hype cycles are good in that they are the market’s way of drawing in capital and talent quickly to discover winners.”
The unit has more than $800m in assets under management and 90+ startups in its portfolio. The team invests in frontier technologies, from AI to robotics, and climate technologies.
One of the unit’s standout investments is air mobility company Joby Aviation. “This investment continues to highlight the potential of collaborations with startups and corporate business units. Our initial investment in 2017 led to a larger one by Toyota Motor Corporation and several manufacturing collaborations, including an announcement in October 2024 of an additional $500m investment,” says Adler.
Adler is keeping his eye closely on AI startups. “We may be in an AI hype cycle right now, but I believe hype cycles are good in that they are the market’s way of drawing in capital and talent quickly to discover winners,” he says. “For AI, we will continue to see its importance in robotics, enterprise applications and even material discovery. AI is also creating a tremendous need for energy, so we anticipate investments in alternative energy such as hydrogen and nuclear as potential ways to meet AI’s energy thirst.”
The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.
