Deepak Mishra, principal at Hitachi Ventures, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Deepak Mishra’s deep passion for data led him to his present role at Hitachi Ventures. Previously a data scientist with a background in insurance, he set up an actuarial club during his undergraduate studies at university.
His career in corporate venturing began at the ventures arm of MS&AD, the Japanese insurance company. He then worked at Avanta Ventures, before joining Hitachi Ventures. Along the way, he also founded a resumé screening startup using natural language processing.
Founded in 2019, Hitachi Ventures looks for startups in industries of strategic relevance to the parent company, such as environment, healthcare, industrial and digital technologies. The team focuses on investing globally and has 35 companies in its portfolio.
“Hitachi Ventures looks for startups in industries of strategic relevance to the parent company, such as environment, healthcare, industrial and digital technologies”
Mishra joined the team around the time Hitachi Ventures established its third fund, with the goal of accelerating innovation and initiating new business opportunities in the digital domain. His role involves vetting technologies that enable digital transformation within enterprises. Mishra explores all aspects of the technology stack, from models and data to the application layer, and groundbreaking technologies such as generative AI as a lever into transformation.
An early highlight for Mishra was his first investment in Ema, an AI agent company building universal AI employees to automate enterprise workflows across multiple business functions and verticals. Mishra collaborates with Ema to drive potential collaborations across Hitachi, as well as with talent introductions such as ML Engineers, or customer introductions outside of Hitachi’s purview.
Generative AI remains a key area of interest for Mishra. He is exploring areas such as small language models, vertical-specific agents, data curation and preparation, observability, business intelligence, software testing, system reliability and DevSecOps. Mishra believes the technology holds the potential to drive significant ROI and a wide range of use cases.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
