[Penn Olson] Well-known Japanese Venture Capitalist Finally Launches His Own Fund

Hiroyuki Watanabe, a well-known venture capitalist in the Japanese start-up community, recently launched his own fund for investing in tech start-ups. It’s called B Dash Ventures and is reportedly expected to be worth 2 billion yen by next year. ... 

NTT Investment Partners, the investment arm of the country’s largest telco, announced it would invest in B Dash Ventures, working together to dig out potential tech start-up personnel and services. NEC Biglobe (Japan’s second-largest ISP), GREE (social network and game platform operator), and Septeni (web/mobile advertising and affiliate) also announced they would be partnering with B Dash. ...

Penn Olson, 9/26/2011

memo

• Start-up focused VCs, or incubators, are increasing rapidly this year such as Net Age or Movida Japan in addition to existing players including Open Network Lab, Incubate Fund, CyberAgent Ventures or Samurai Incubate. In other words, a number of startups should be increasing as well. It would be a problem that there are not enough VCs to invest in the startups incubated by those incubators for next fundraising rounds.