Kay Enjoji has been leading TEL Venture Capital (TVC), the corporate venturing unit of Japan-based semiconductor and display equipment producer Tokyo Electron (TEL), since he was named president in 2011.
Enjoji was also promoted to vice-president of corporate innovation at TEL in 2017, a role through which he develops the company’s corporate strategy.
In addition to this, he is also head of the innovative technology planning group and oversees the unit’s collaborations with startups.
TVC has started collaborations with six startups in the last 12 months and has 20 on-going collaborations.
Enjoji has more than 30 years of experience in the semiconductor technology sector and 10 years of experience in the advanced display industry, after working at TEL since the 1980s in a number of management roles.
TVC primarily invests in companies that relate to its core business areas of semiconductor and advance display technologies but is also interested in areas such as photonics, sensors, energy storage, flexible electronics and medical devices.
TVC invested in eight companies during 2020, three of which it served as a lead investor in the round. It has also secured three exits in the past year.
Enjoji said emerging technologies such as deep learning, MicroLED and Ferroelectric RAM were notable areas TVC is currently investing in.
TVC participated in a $20m series B funding round for advanced memory technology provider Ferroelectric Memory in November 2020.
In February 2020, the corporate venturing unit backed a $2.2m funding round for Hprobe, a developer of testing equipment for magnetic devices.
Enjoji sits on the boards of portfolio companies including Floadia, Light Polymers, Tsukuba-Seiko, Alberta Nano-Monitoring Systems, Innovative Particle-Monitoring Technologies, Opt Creation, Liola, Genalyte, EnerVault, Crystal Solar, Tau-Metrix and Quantum 14.
Prior to becoming president at TVC, Enjoji was a director in the microelectromechanical systems division at TEL from 2003. He also spent a three and half-year stint as senior manager of corporate marketing at the business from 2000.
Before that, Enjoji held a senior manager role at TEL from 1994, in which he was involved in product marketing and oversaw sales for the company’s chemical vapour deposition and physical vapour deposition systems.
Enjoji, who graduated with a master’s degree in economics from Keio University, previously handled sales for cancer treatment technology provider Varian in Japan.
In the past, Enjoji served as a steering committee member of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which is one of the largest public research organisations in Japan.
