Alex Kurosawa has become a venture capitalist drawing upon his career in engineering, marketing, business development and private equity investments both in the US and Japan.

Most recently, he has been responsible for Start-up101 Venture Funds since 2000 with focus on multimedia, communication and semiconductor. The partners of the Fund are from the US and Japan and the portfolio include ventures from both countries. The Fund invests mostly in early stage, i.e., seed and Series A round. Along with the investment activities, Alex has been conducting management consulting activities to facilitate the growth of a business in those two countries since 1999.

Prior to co-founding the Start-up101 Venture Funds with Mr. Yawata, Alex had started and grew a few technology start-ups. In 1997, he joined Sonics, Inc., a semiconductor IP and EDA company, as the first Vice President, Sales and Marketing. Alex brought in the first major deal with multiple divisions of NEC and built a pipeline of customers for revenue growth. The Company’s licensee shipments surpassed the one billion unit mark worldwide in 2010. The founding team consisted of executives who span out from MicroUnity, where Alex became the first Vice President, Business Development in 1996.

Upon the introduction of a new super-computer product (Serial #1) in Japan in 1993, Alex joined IKOS Systems (NADQ: IKOS) President, Asian Operations, and founded IKOS Systems K.K. as CEO. He rapidly grew business from scratch in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Under his leadership, the Company achieved more than several million dollars revenue within three years. He engaged most of the key accounts in the region. Revenues doubled year by year and reached over $4M in three years. He exceeded sales quota every year.

In 1989, VLSI invited and sponsored Alex Kurosawa to move to the US as a manager for the newly defined joint venture between Hitachi and VLSI. As an engineering manager, he headed up an engineering team to develop key products. As an account manager, he organized engineering and marketing activities executives, engineers, sales and marketing managers in multiple international locations of the two companies.

Alex has founded and managed a few non-profit organizations as well. In 2008, he founded Kurosawa Piano Music Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity organization,  to inspire the youth and diverse communities through the transforming beauty of piano ensemble music. In 2000, he co-founded IAI Japan, an NPO in Japan, to educate and mentor entrepreneurs and angels in Tokyo. Alex is an author of many technical and business papers, and is a patent holder. He was a technical committee member of CICC (IEEE Conference) until 2000. He received his BSEE and MSEE degrees from Yokohama National University in Japan in 1978 and 1980, respectively.

Keisuke Yawata, Investment Pertner

Keisuke Yawata Investment Partner Keisuke Yawata, a leader in the semiconductor industry, served for 40 years as President and CEO of several major industry operations in the United States and Japan, including Applied Materials Japan, LSI Logic KK, and NEC Electronics While he was with Applied Materials Japan, the company enjoyed its best two years under his leadership, establishing relationships with the top executives among its customer base.

Formerly, Keisuke was President and CEO of LSI Logic KK, a subsidiary of LSI Logic Corporation for ten years. He built up the subsidiary from almost zero in 1985 to approximately $100 million in 1994. His last accomplishment before his departure was the design win for Sony's Play Station. At NEC, where he spent approximately 27 years. he led integrated circuit development in various capacities. Under his leadership, the company built its first class-1000 cleanroom in 1972, achieving 30% increase in yields. The company's US, European and Asian semiconductor operations were initiated by his team.

His prior position was as President and CEO of NEC Electronics in Mountain View (currently Santa Clara) between 1981 and 1984. In 1997, Keiske founded The Future International, in order to facilitate the commercial success of emerging technologies and products from Silicon Valley, primarily semiconductor related, through alliances with the Japanese electronics industry.

He served on the board of directors of TeraLogic (Mountain View), and he has structured successful design in and investment agreements with Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Quickturn Design Systems (currently in Mountain view acquired by Cadence) developed customer relationships with major semiconductor manufacturers while he was on the Board. These include NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Oki. In order to generate a homerun success story from Japan, he has been actively investing in Japan as well. For example, NGR K.K. is a semiconductor software start-up that he co-founded in Kawasaki in 2000.

Keisuke and Alex Kurosawa are co-founders of the Japan chapters of IAI Japan, a non-profit organization for educating and mentoring angels and entrepreneurs. Under his leadership as chairman, the chapters hold start-up management workshops and showcase events regularly, and most importantly inspire and advise start-up teams. Keisuke is Investment Partner of Start-up101 Fund, overseeing all the investment activities together with Alex.

Educated in both Japan and the US, Keisuke Yawata was awarded his BSEE from Osaka University in 1958 and his MSEE from Syracuse University in 1963 where he was a Fulbright scholar.

Nobuhiro (Nobu) Michishita has spent his 20-year career as a front-runner in developing new business in the areas of networking, wireless communication and Internet infrastructure. His experience has been built through technical and business management positions at Yokogawa/Hewlett Packard (1983~1988), Net One Systems (1988~1994), and Mitsubishi International Corporation (1994~2000).

After a one-year intensive training at the Hewlett Packard Network Marketing Center in Cupertino California, Nobu managed one of the earliest installations of an IEEE 802.3 and Ethernet local area network (LAN) in Japan. Later, while leading a network technology group at Hewlett Packard, Nobu realized that LANs and the Internet would become the hottest advancement in technology.

Based on this insight, he joined the fledgling Net One Systems, focusing on LAN and Internet-related products and services. His team at Net One was a pioneer in deploying LANs for personal-computer platforms and extending corporate LANs to the nationwide Intranet by implementing remote LAN bridges and gateways. During this time, he identified the sizable potential of Cisco, a start-up at that time. His team installed Japan's first Cisco router products at NTT and kept acquiring other major Japanese customers, such as Sony, Nissan, Panasonic. In this project, his charter included: (1) closing a distribution contract with Cisco; (2) sales closure with local customers: (3) establishing the support structure of CISCO products in Japan; and (4) acting as the Japanese liaison for Cisco's technical support. He grew revenues with Cisco products to $10M within the first 4 years.

Joining Mitsubishi he moved from Japan to Palo Alto to head up a business development division, with focus on partnerships with competitive U.S. based start-ups. He brought in deal flow flawlessly, managed due-diligence processes, negotiated investment terms, and set up distribution channels in Japan. His charter eventually expanded into all the IT related projects on top of the one in communication. Nobu was an angel investor and adviser to many start-up companies.  He facilitated PayPal's business expansion in Asia by introducing them to many target companies for possible business partnerships. As only one of five companies to achieve an initial public offer in 2002, PayPal was later acquired by E-Bay.

Nobu received a BSCS from Electro-Communication University (Japan) in 1983. He is the author of more than a dozen technical publications on network protocols, connectivity, and security.