Japan's Coral Capital names new partner

It is the VC firm’s first partner-level hire since rebranding earlier this year. Nishimura will not work directly on investments but is expected to play a role in deal sourcing by managing content for Coral’s Japanese-language blog.

Coral claims that its blog, which covers portfolio developments as well as broader tech-related trends, is the most trafficked site of its kind in Japan with up to 30,000 hits per week. This rises to 200,000 hits per week when including traffic on related social media feeds.

“If you look at Silicon Valley, for example, and these days even Southeast Asia, everyone in the VC world is publishing,” James Riney, a founding partner and CEO at Coral, told AVCJ. “They’re doing everything they can to get their name out there so entrepreneurs will contact them. That’s the motivation for this first and foremost, but it also helps the ecosystem quite a bit because the quality of entrepreneurs also increases as more information spreads into the market.”

Nishimura served as a start-up liaison for Google for just over a year starting in mid-2018. The job included helping establish an accelerator in Japan and facilitating a relationship with local corporate analytics services provider Abeja. Google joined a JPY6 billion ($55 million) Series C for Abeja in December last year. Prior to this, he worked for six years as an editor and events head at TechCrunch, where he managed an annual start-up conference in Tokyo.

Coral launched its Japan program in 2015 with a $30 million fund that focuses on seed-stage technology plays and portfolio support through in-house recruiting and public relations. It closed its debut fund under the Coral brand in March with about JPY5 billion in commitments. This has been topped up, however, with another JPY1 billion from an unnamed institutional investor. The firm claims half of its JPY12 billion of assets under management has come from institutional LPs.

The benefits of VC-driven media outreach are difficult to quantify in terms of deal flow and ecosystem development. Riney compares the strategy to the content-media concept known as nurturing, whereby a slow network-building process leads indirectly to positive outcomes. He noted that Coral reviews 200-300 companies per month and invests one or two of these. Many of the eventual investees claim to have been attracted to the VC by its blog.

“In Japan, people tend to stay with companies and not change jobs, but that is starting to change. They might see a blog post and decide to consider becoming a founder or engineer working for a start-up,” said Nishimura. “I believe we’re at the tipping point of the Japan start-up ecosystem, and I want to accelerate that process and help invigorate the economy.”

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