CVC veteran Takuya Hosomura, who spent a combined eight years at Rakuten Capital and Salesforce Ventures, joined Global Brain as a partner.

Takuya Hosomura

Takuya Hosomura has departed from his Japan-based principal role at Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of US enterprise software producer Salesforce.

At Salesforce Ventures, Hosomura led 15 new investments including funding rounds for Aeye Security Lab, Asobica, Baseconnect and FastLabel. He also oversaw follow-on funding for Andpad, Kakehashi and Readyfor.

Hosomura joined Global Brain, the Japanese venture capital firm that also manages several corporate venturing funds such as telecoms firm KDDI’s Open Innovation Funds, property developer Mitsui Fudosan’s 31Ventures unit and logistics firm Yamato Holdings’ Kuroneko Innovation Funds.

As a partner at Global Brain, Hosomura will focus on enterprise software and artificial intelligence technology developers.

Before he joined Salesforce Ventures in early 2020, Hosomura spent nearly six years at Rakuten, including a senior manager position at the corporate VC unit, Rakuten Capital. He also helped launch Rakuten Accelerator in partnership with pre-seed investor Techstars.

“I will utilise what I learned at my previous jobs at Salesforce Ventures and Rakuten Capital, and carefully build up my investment and support one by one to contribute to the development of the startup ecosystem in Japan,” Hosomura said in a LinkedIn post.

Edison Fu

Edison Fu is a reporter and Asia liaison at Global Corporate Venturing.