Jim Adler joined Toyota Ventures, the first standalone venture capital firm of Japan-based automotive manufacturer Toyota, as founding managing director in July 2017.
With more than $500m in assets under management across four flagship funds, Toyota Ventures focuses on early-stage investments in frontier and climate technologies, such as AI, robotics, autonomy, mobility, fintech, smart cities, digital health, renewable energy, hydrogen solutions, EV and battery tech, and carbon capture, removal and usage. Its mission is to explore innovative areas for Toyota by helping startups that are developing new technologies and business models bring those innovations to market quickly.
Recent additions to its portfolio include stakes in Ecolectro, a climate tech company enabling green hydrogen to scale; Teller, a decentralized finance protocol for lending; and Agtonomy, a developer of hybrid autonomy and tele-assist platforms for agriculture machines.
Adler joined Toyota Research Institute (TRI) – another Toyota subsidiary – in May 2016 from software provider Microsoft following its acquisition of Metanautix, where he had led products and marketing. Metanautix was a big-data analytics startup funded by Sequoia Capital and Workday.
An offshoot of TRI, Toyota Ventures was initially known as Toyota AI Ventures before being renamed in June 2021. Along with the rebrand, Toyota Ventures also announced a $150M Frontier Fund and a new $150m Climate Fund aimed at finding and funding early-stage startups that develop innovative solutions for carbon neutrality.
Adler said: “Startups are tackling the world’s challenges, and at Toyota Ventures we want to open even more paths to investing in them. Since we started our first fund four years ago, we’ve been on a journey with our portfolio companies to discover what’s next for Toyota and for the world.”
Adler has a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida as well as a master’s in electrical and computer engineering from UC San Diego.
