Yuko Masuda, corporate development manager at Marubeni Power, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Yuko Masuda has been with Japan-based conglomerate Marubeni for nearly 15 years and now leads sourcing, investment and business development for its energy activities. She has, in effect, become the innovation advocate for a 160-year-old company.
“I am type of a business culture translator,” she says. “A small startup and a big corporation speak different languages and have different timelines. I need to speak in the right way for them to collaborate.”
Masuda began as an associate at Marubeni in Japan, working with M&A and energy asset management. A move to New York a decade ago led to her building her knowledge of the industry. But taking a business development role in Silicon Valley, scouting for startups, sourcing deals and sending back information to the parent company, was what fuelled her passion for innovation in the energy sector.
“A small startup and a big corporation speak different languages and have different timelines. I need to speak in the right way for them to collaborate”
“I was in Silicon Valley for four years and that was fascinating,” she says. “People talk about industry and their vision for the future all of the time – at picnics on the weekend, at lunchtime, at dinner time, anytime.
“That is the time I started thinking about how to bring that atmosphere and sense of urgency to the big corporation and that was the start of becoming the innovation advocate in the company. It happened to be at a time when the company was realising the industry had been disrupted and started to see how they could be the ones with the new thing.”
Now back in Japan, Masuda’s team manages a portfolio of four startups, each of which has a commercial or strategic partnership in place with Marubeni. She is the translator between startups, which have been around for three or four years, and executives who may have been running a business for 30 or 40 years.
“The innovation vocabulary is becoming a common language throughout the organisation,” she says. “It is fulfilling being the one who is on the business unit side.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
