Yusuke Sorita, senior managing director and senior general manager, investment department at Nissay Capital, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
Yusuke Sorita is the senior managing director and senior general manager, investment department at Nissay Capital, the corporate VC arm of Nippon Life Insurance Company.
Given that Nissay Capital functions as a traditional VC fund on behalf of its parent Nippon Life, its investments each year are credited to the firm’s active funds, such as the Nissay Capital Sustainability Solutions Fund, Nissay Strategic 1 fund and the 15th Nissay Capital fund, launched in August 2025 at ¥10bn as part of an annualised evergreen-style cadence.
Nissay Capital is one of Japan’s most active corporate venture arms, investing mostly at seed and series A stages, focusing largely on domestic opportunities. Founded in 1991, it has backed 1,000-plus startups and achieved more than 250 IPOs.
Apart from Qlay Technologies, the US-headquartered creator of an AI tool that detects cheating in interview situations, all of Nissay Capital’s 30-plus investments this past year were in Japanese startups, spanning preseed deals all the way to series C rounds.
Sorita, who moved into the senior Nissay Capital role in 2025 after a career across Nippon Life/Nissay Asset Management covering bonds, equities and global asset-management posts in Tokyo, New York, London, Frankfurt and Des Moines, oversees the firm’s overall investment strategy, particularly those addressing critical societal challenges, such as sustainability and digital transformation and longevity and health, to hedge risks and build ecosystems for Nippon Life’s core insurance customers.
But the unit has also taken some idiosyncratic bets, backing startups as diverse as fish breeder Sakana Dream, VTuber entertainment studio Blackbox, water propulsion system developer Pale Blue and Zeal Boxing Fitness. The portfolio’s diversity underscores the breadth of innovation quietly taking place within Japan’s startup ecosystem.
Its most recent corporate venturing deployments this year include Fogg, through Fund 15; Rehab for Japan, through the Y5bn ($38.1m) Nissay Strategic 1 fund; and Think Nature’s Y380m seed round, through Nissay’s sustainability fund.
These are revealing: creator/fan-economy services, care management infrastructure and biodiversity data are not a narrow insurtech portfolio, but a map of demographic, consumer and sustainability themes relevant to a life insurer’s long-duration worldview.
Sorita’s importance is therefore as a bridge figure: a public-markets and credit-trained institutional investor now running venture exposure for one of Japan’s biggest long-term capital pools.
The GCV 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.
Here’s a snapshot of their recent deals:
