A venture capitalist can promise an introduction to Japan in roughly the time it takes to refill a coffee. The difficult part begins after the email: finding the buyer with budget, translating a product into a local need, surviving procurement and turning a polite meeting into a working deployment. Scrum Ventures has spent more than a decade building around that unglamorous middle.
The San Francisco- and Tokyo-based firm invests in early-stage technology companies, but its more unusual product is the route around the investment. Through Scrum Studio, it convenes global startups, large Japanese companies, municipalities, universities and industry operators around specific problems. A founder may arrive with a robot, a cooling material or a navigation system. Scrum's job is to find the place where that technology can be useful, tested and bought.
That makes the firm part investor, part translator and part business-development shop. It also explains why its portfolio can look wildly broad - humanoid robots, mobility, healthcare, climate technology, commerce, fintech, live entertainment and sleep devices. The common thread is less a sector than a commercial passage between two markets.
The investor who had already crossed the bridge
Founder Tak Miyata did not begin as a career financier. He worked as a systems engineer, started the biometrics company Neven Vision in the United States and sold it to Google in 2006. He then founded image-analysis company J-Magic in Japan and later ran Mixi's American operation. By the time he founded Scrum Ventures in 2013, he had experienced both directions of the U.S.-Japan journey - and the friction that appears when technology, language and corporate decision-making collide.
Scrum initially presented itself as a seed investor with a Silicon Valley network and an Asian edge. The current version is more explicit. Its investment team takes a thematic approach, studies emerging categories and helps portfolio founders with hiring, strategy, fundraising and introductions. Its studio team packages cross-border access into repeatable programs. Together they give Japanese organizations a filtered view of global startups and give founders something more concrete than a list of names.
This is a two-customer business. Founders want capital, credibility, customers and a navigable path into Japan. Corporations want a manageable way to discover startups without mistaking a demo day for innovation. Scrum sits between them, investing through its funds and operating corporate-sponsored programs through Scrum Studio. The precise fee economics are private, but the architecture is visible: investment returns on one side, innovation and market-entry services on the other.
The cross-border operating loop
A ballpark becomes a laboratory
The cleanest example sits outside Sapporo. Hokkaido Ballpark F Village, the mixed-use development around the Nippon-Ham Fighters' stadium, is the center of Hokkaido F Village X, or HFX. Scrum Ventures and Scrum Studio manage the three-year program with operational support from Fighters Sports & Entertainment. Corporate partners, local government, universities and regional groups participate. Startups get something accelerators often describe but rarely control: a visible place to try the product.
The first year attracted more than 300 applications from 29 countries. Eleven companies were chosen, including humanoid robotics company Apptronik, passive-cooling materials maker Eztia, food-coating startup Mori, sensing company Pontosense and accessible-navigation platform Waymap. Scrum reported 10 active co-creation partnerships and a participant net promoter score of 90. By 2026, several projects had advanced toward full deployment.
“They're connected to both government and the private sector. The scale, the energy, the number of partners - it's very different from other programs.”Kazuma Anzai, TechMagic, on HFX
Hokkaido is a shrewd stage because it contains both spectacle and stubborn problems. The ballpark supplies crowds and operational complexity. The wider region supplies agriculture, logistics, cold weather, an aging population, rural depopulation and new investment in energy and data infrastructure. In other words, a robot or mobility startup can encounter an actual job rather than an innovation theater backdrop.
Year two widened the field to sports and stadium technology, agrifood, mobility, sustainability and wellbeing. Nippon Ham joined as a corporate partner, while former professional baseball player and entrepreneur Yuki Saito became a venture partner. The baseball connection is not decoration. It gives Scrum a venue, an operator, an audience and a set of commercial problems in one address.
A studio for every corporate worry
Scrum's program history reads like a catalog of boardroom anxieties. SmartCityX addressed how people live, learn and work. Food Tech Studio - Bites! focused on safety, waste and resilience in the food supply. Well-BeingX paired wellness startups with Japanese corporations. AgeTechX, sponsored with Hakuhodo, dealt with longevity and independent living. GreenX, with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, pursued energy technology and Japan's decarbonization goals.
The newest expression is Full Bloom at SAKURA DEEPTECH SHIBUYA, an innovation hub inside Shibuya Sakura Stage. Its 2026 class included 13 startups from five countries working across AI, immersive displays, advanced materials, biosensing, audio and communications. Spotify Japan and Square Enix Holdings joined as co-creation partners. This is where Scrum's broad portfolio starts to make sense: a technology does not need to fit a tidy venture category if it can improve a media experience, a building or a consumer product.
There are simpler market-entry engagements, too. Scrum Studio says it supported rewards app Miles for a year and a half before its Japan launch with partners including JAL and FamilyMart; the app reached one million downloads in four weeks. It helped autonomous restaurant company Yo-Kai Express with business development, marketing and publicity; assisted volumetric-video company Arcturus with local partnerships; and supports live-events marketplace Fever in Japan. Those cases turn “access” from a pitch-deck noun into a sequence of work.
Sports becomes a fund, not a side project
Scrum's first vertically focused vehicle closed in January 2025. Scrum Sports & Entertainment Fund I raised $68 million from a long list of Japanese strategic limited partners, including SBI Group, Japanet Holdings, Sega Sammy, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, MUFG Bank, WOWOW and others. Kazuhiro Kiyoshige, a former Dentsu sports-marketing executive, and Michael Proman, whose career includes Coca-Cola, the NBA and a startup exit, run the strategy.
The fund had already made 16 investments when it was announced. The roster stretches beyond scoreboards: Fever for live discovery, TMRW Sports for technology-led sports media, Campus Ink for athlete and student merchandise, Ozlo Sleep for sleep audio, Volo Sports for recreational leagues and Misapplied Sciences for displays that show different images to different viewers. Scrum's thesis is that the technologies orbiting fandom, participation, venues and media can travel into other industries.
Where the model earns its keep
Scrum competes for founders with cross-border investors such as World Innovation Lab, TransLink Capital and DNX Ventures, and for corporate budgets with accelerators, consultants and in-house venture teams. Its defensibility is not exclusivity. A startup can take money from several firms; a corporation can run more than one program. The advantage is operational density - investors, bilingual staff, industry specialists, local institutions and deployment partners arranged around a defined theme.
The model still carries familiar risks. Corporate collaboration moves slowly. A successful pilot may never become recurring revenue. Broad sector coverage can dilute expertise, and a bridge matters only while people want to cross it. Scrum's answer has been to specialize at the program level: one team can remain a generalist investor while each studio recruits partners who understand a narrower problem.
That produces a practical lesson for anyone building a network business. Relationships become more valuable when they are packaged into a process with a deadline, a place and an expected outcome. HFX has a region and a demo day. Full Bloom has Shibuya and commercial themes. The sports fund has operators and strategic limited partners. The container gives both sides a reason to act.
Scrum Ventures is therefore best understood not as an American VC with a Tokyo office, nor as a Japanese accelerator with a San Francisco address. It is an attempt to make the space between those descriptions into a business. The check gets a founder to the door. The studio is what tries to open it.
The portfolio offers a record of how long that work can take. Scrum lists public-market outcomes including ExaWizards, Photosynth and FAST ACCOUNTING, alongside acquisitions such as mobility company Chariot, data company Second Measure and fintech platform Apto. Its featured private companies include Apptronik, May Mobility, Noom, GrubMarket, ThirdLove and Osso VR. These are not one cohort marching in formation. They are companies at different stages whose useful overlap is the possibility of customers, capital or expansion on the other side of the Pacific.
Inside the firm, that variety requires a mixed team. The public roster includes former founders, finance operators, accelerator managers and specialists in sports, technical investment and portfolio growth. Offices in San Francisco and Tokyo are supplemented by people elsewhere in the United States. Portfolio testimonials emphasize a willingness to join off-sites and work through strategy rather than stopping at a board introduction. Testimonials are marketing, of course, but they describe the behavior Scrum needs its model to reward: patient, bilingual follow-through after the exciting meeting ends.