Ryu Muramatsu, founding partner of Japan-based internet services provider GMO Internet’s corporate venturing division GMO Venture Partners, had a vision to build a $1bn startup. Having now invested in or co-founded more than 50 companies in his career, he has seen three of them reach this market capitalisation.
Two of them are related to his company, GMO and GMO Payment Gateway, while the third is China-based internet company Qihoo360, which has hit $10bn in valuation and has set up its own corporate venturing fund.
Both GMO and its Payment Gateway have their own corporate venturing units. GMO Venture Partners (GMO VP) was set up in 2005 and of its 60 portfolio companies, eight have floated, including Qihoo 360 Technology – which delisted at the end of last year – Fullspeed, Accelmark, Next, Vector, FreakOut, LockOn and RealWorld.
GMO VP has operated a number of funds, including the ¥2.3bn Social Ad & Commerce Technology fund started in 2011, according to Muramatsu’s LinkedIn profile.
This was two years before the $15m GMO Global Payment Fund Investment Partnership was set up – with Muramatsu as managing partner – as “a fund of payment companies, by a payment company, for payment companies”. Its portfolio companies include CodaPay, 2c2P, Red Dot Payment, Dragonpay and Neweb Technologies.
Before GMO, Muramatsu worked for Jafco, the largest VC in Japan, and at its Silicon Valley subsidiary in charge of business development and connecting Japanese portfolio companies to the US. His GMO profile said these Jafco deals included “one of the most successful investments at that time, GMO Internet”.