Akira Kurabayashi

Akira Kurabayashi General Information

Description

Mr. Akira Kurabayashi serves as Managing Director at DNX Ventures. He serves as a Board Observer at Refcome. He serves as Board Member at Adacotech. He is also a Executive Partner at From Scratch Company. He seves as Board Member at toBe Marketing. He also serves as Board Observer at Growth Hack Studio and Folio. He focuses primarily on early stage venture investments in enterprise sector in Japan, including SaaS, Analytics, Social, Mobile, IoT and electric devices. 76Before joining Draper Nexus in 2015, he was Senior Director of Corporate Development & Salesforce Ventures at salesforce.com. He led 16 investments in less than 4 years and built salesforce's partnership ecosystem with Japanese start-ups. He served as a board observer of Hottolink (TSE 3680) and Nihon Gigei (acquired by Netyear), and led PIPE investment in 1st Holdings (acquired by Orix). Prior to Salesforce Ventures, he was Director at Globespan Capital Partners, where he focused on Japan investment and Japan business development of US portfolio companies in enterprise sector. Prior to Globespan, he spent 5 years at Mitsui & Co.,Ltd and led the company's venture capital activities both in the US and Japan. He was Co-Founder & Director of Mitsui's Technology Investment Group in Silicon Valley, where he led investment in Beceem Communications (acquired by Broadcom), Luidia (acquired by PNF), and Smart Signal (acquired by GE Intelligent Platforms). Before moved to the US, he was Investment Manager at Mitsui's information & Electronics Business Unit in Tokyo and evaluated and executed number of investments including INTERTRADE (TSE 3747). Previously, he spent 5 years at Fujitsu Limited in various roles including Corporate Development, Corporate Strategy and Sales. He worked at Walden International's Tokyo office and promoted alliance between start-ups backed by Walden and Fujitsu. While he worked at Sales division dedicated to NTT docomo, he sold and deployed nationwide 2.5G mobile infrastructure and CTI system. He was a member of the investment banking team with Goldman Sachs in Tokyo. He was also an active angel investor & advisor of Japanese/Asian start-ups, including enigmo (TSE 3665) and SCHAFT (acquired by Google). He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a double major in finance and entrepreneurial management and a bachelor of commerce degree from Doshisha University. He also serves as Board Member at Trend Express. He serves as Board Member at Mazrica. He also serves as Board Observer at Flect.