Wataru ‘Doug’ Kuribayashi has been president and CEO of Presidio Ventures, the $200m corporate venture capital arm of Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Corporation, since 2020. In the past three years, he has diversified the investment scope of the unit considerably.
Presidio was founded in 1998 and focused on IT and digital transformation technology companies. However, it has now moved beyond this original remit.
“We now invest in multiple sectors such as healthcare, energy management, climatetech, agtech, fintech, AI semiconductors, mobility, robotics, autopilot system for the air cargo operations and so on,” says Kuribayashi.
Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Presidio has additional offices in Boston and Los Angeles. “In Boston, we have a great network with MIT and Harvard University. In LA, we are focusing more on the media sector given the presence of Hollywood,” he says.
“Presidio Ventures has more than 50 active portfolio companies and has had more than 50 exits over the years”
Besides Presidio, Sumitomo has another business innovation group for Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, which focuses on business development with Presidio for different business units.
Presidio Ventures has more than 50 active portfolio companies and has had more than 50 exits over the years. It has fi ve investments which have reached “unicorn” valuations of more than $1bn, including human resources management platform HiBob, remote-desktop software provider Splashtop and TeaLium, which has built a customer data aggregation tool for marketing. The other two portfolio unicorns are logistics robotic system producer Dexterity and connected home software-as-a service platform Plume.
Kuribayashi has been with Sumitomo since 1995 in a variety of roles, including CEO of the e-commerce subsidiary, Sumisho E-commerce in China, as well as a stint at SCSK, an IT services offshoot.
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