Wei Cong Seah, investment manager at Arkray, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Wei Cong Seah was the first investor hired by Japanese medical device company Arkray in 2022, where he helped build up the CVC unit from scratch. Seah, who originally qualified as a lawyer, already had experience in corporate venturing, working first as a startup scout and investor at NUS Enterprise and then as investment manager at SPH Ventures.
Seah was attracted by the opportunity to start with a blank canvas at Arkray. “I wanted to bring all the best practices and VC experience I have gained so far to the CVC,” he says.
Among the many challenges, Seah had to learn to navigate traditional Japanese corporate culture.
“I was mindful that it was the first time Arkray was doing this type of investing and that the medical device industry was quite conservative in nature. There was a lot of educating internally. During my first year, I was teaching my management about startups and how and why we were investing,” he says.
“I wanted to bring all the best practices and VC experience I have gained so far to the CVC.”
Seah’s focus at Arkray is on the broader healthcare sector and adjacent areas such as ecommerce, fintech and sustainability that have a healthcare focus.
“Healthcare should not be viewed in isolation but holistically, considering that it is intricately linked to all these interconnected factors such as environmental degradation and climate change,” he says.
Seah has done three investments so far for Arkray, with a fourth in the planning, and has promoted collaborations between portfolio companies and the parent company’s business units. The CVC unit invests from the corporate balance sheet and will invest from seed-stage funding rounds up to series B.
Now that the Arkray unit is moving out of the intense set-up phase, Seah is looking forward to working more directly with startups and taking on more mentorship roles. “It is full steam ahead now,” he says. “I am hoping to do much more mentoring of startups this year.”
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
