Building Geodesic Capital

Ten years ago, sitting in office space at Wilson Sonsini, we at Geodesic had a simple but strongly held belief: the best enterprise software companies would need to win the Japanese market to become true global leaders.

Japan was then and remains one of the largest economies and most technically sophisticated and sizable enterprise software markets in the world, while adhering to the rule of law and IP protection. The Japanese market is also extremely complicated. It rewards long-term relationship building, demands deep localization, and operates according to a unique go-to-market structure. We had seen too many startups stumble not because their technology wasn’t good enough, but because they approached Japan like any other international expansion. The market truly is unique.

Our belief then was, and continues to be now, that success in Japan would be a sizable contribution to overall startup performance and a meaningful contributor to generating alpha on investments. Just look at Apple, Salesforce, Twitter/X, and many other businesses with large Japan revenues or market position (often the 2nd largest market after the U.S. and a meaningful percentage of global revenue). And Japanese giants like Rakuten and Yahoo Japan represent massive businesses with tens of billions of dollars in market cap, a testament to the size of the Japan market. 

So we set out to raise a growth-stage venture capital fund that would do more than just write checks. We wanted to concretely and measurably help portfolio companies win the Japanese market, avoid crucial mistakes, and build big successful businesses, and we believed we could access the best startups with that value proposition. This assistance meant everything from sharing market advice and finding the right country managers to run their Japan business, to making introductions to customers and GTM partners that would have taken years to develop independently, and helping navigate regulatory complexities that could derail deals. 

We would complete this investing and value-add flywheel by raising much of the capital from Japanese blue chip institutions and corporates, who would not only get best-in-class returns but also gain access to cutting-edge startups and Silicon Valley innovation for their own enterprise transformation. With Mitsubishi Corporation as our anchor partner, we launched Fund I in 2015 and began applying what we call our “air and ground game” value-add approach. 

Fast forward to today, and the results have exceeded even our own expectations:

At our 10 year anniversary, Geodesic Capital has around $1 billion in AUM across 5 funds. In addition to our flagship growth-stage funds, we’ve recently launched the Alliance Fund, an early-stage vehicle focused on the space and security sectors, which furthers the partnership between the US and Japan. Our model combines the senior Japanese relationships built by our founder, former US Ambassador to Japan John Roos, with those of our Tokyo-based operator team, who have deep experience assisting startups to build in Japan. 

We’ve made more than 65 investments, with nearly half now operating in the Japan market (and more to come). Our portfolio includes such names as Databricks, Netskope, Figma, UiPath, Marqeta, Uber, Airbnb, Confluent, Vercel, Tanium, Looker, Clickhouse, JFrog, Glean, Island, Otter, and Kin, many of whom have large and thriving Japan businesses (sometimes even their second largest market after the US and in many cases their fastest growing market. As an example, Japan represents approximately 10% of our former portfolio company UiPath’s global revenue per its latest filing). Our Japanese Limited Partner base includes mega banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, trading companies, and institutional investors. 

Our annual Geodesic Forum has become something special. We bring around 15-17 startups (both portfolio and non-portfolio companies) to Tokyo for three days of curated meetings and events to explore the market. As we like to say, it’s a year’s worth of business development compressed into three days. Watching founders have those “aha moments” about Japan’s potential never gets old.

In short, 10 years in, we have built a tangible, referenceable, value-add, investment approach that differentiates us from many others in the venture capital landscape and allows us to access many of the best founders and startups on the planet. It certainly hasn’t been easy, but the impact on our portfolio companies (and our returns) validates the approach.

As we celebrate our 10 year anniversary, where are we going with the next 10 years?

Our goal remains to build a multi-stage, multi-product firm while remaining focused on our core DNA: bridging and growing the relationship between Silicon Valley (SV) and Japan—what we call the SV-Japan bridge.  We see opportunities for funds investing in additional sectors, at additional stages, and with a variety of investing products. And we’re excited about helping Japanese founders and startups (we have one in the portfolio today) expand globally too, making this truly a two-way bridge.

Finally, we’d like to thank all of the current Geodesic folks and their families, Geodesic alums, valued advisors, LPs, portcos, and all supporters who played a role in getting us this far.  Many of you backed an untested team and vision 10 years ago and continue to support us today.  Thank you for that.

誠にありがとうございます.  

頑張りましょう!