VC unit of Japan's KLab spins out, rebrands as Anobaka

The name, which roughly translates to “fools,” was chosen along with the slogan “empowering mad dreams” to summarize a mission statement focused on seemingly illogical risk-taking in spite of a conservative society. The idea is that success comes more from courage than talent.

KVP’s president and CEO Yasukazu Nagano (pictured center) has led a management buyout of the firm from KLab, taking a 70% stake for an undisclosed sum, according to a statement. Anobaka is expected to launch a fund targeting several billion yen in the first half of 2022. Local investors Drone Fund and Oriental Land Innovations have signalled initial interest in participating as LPs.

Nagano was a business development executive at KLab in 2011 when he helped establish KVP under the name KLab Ventures with support from SBI Investment. The sector-agnostic seed-stage investor was controlled on a 50-50 basis by SBI and KLab until 2015, when the gaming company made it a 100% subsidiary under the name KLab Venture Partners and eventually KVP.

The debut fund had a corpus of JPY1.7 billion ($16.4 million). Fund II is said to have raised JPY2.8 billion against a JPY3.5 billion target as of October with LPs including Kiraboshi Bank and the Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation Japan. The two funds have invested more than 80 start-ups to date, with deployments falling a range of JPY10-50 million. There have been at least eight exits.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• North Asia
• GPs
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Japan
• seed
• Spin outs