New Year’s Greetings and New Strategies for 2025
To make a big leap in 2025, Global Brain will forge ahead as one team, centered on the new strategies we announced at the Global Brain Alliance Forum.
Written by Yasuhiko Yurimoto
Happy New Year, everyone. This is Yasuhiko Yurimoto, President & CEO of Global Brain Corporation (GB).
In 2024, we launched nine funds including our flagship fund GB-IX. Our annual fundraising amount reached JPY 79.13 billion, and our AUM landed at JPY 339.59 billion. We made a total of 168 investments worth JPY 33.6 billion. Amidst a tough market environment, we have proudly closed the year with record-high achievements.
To make the year 2025 another year of remarkable achievements, we plan to move ahead following the strategies below, which I announced at our annual Global Brain Alliance Forum.
Establish GB’s unique investment model
The performance forecasts of all our flagship funds exceed 2.5x, showcasing a high level compared to global standards. On the other hand, we observed that some global venture capital firms with fund sizes too big were struggling to perform after the startup bubble burst. It seems they are also facing fundraising challenges.
This presents us with a significant opportunity. We will contribute to building companies that can compete on the global stage by ramping up efforts to lead-invest in startups with high growth potential and offer thorough hands-on support, while maintaining appropriate fund sizes.
Build the global No.1 hands-on support structure
We pride ourselves for our deep and wide hands-on support, which we consider top-level in the world. We have built the foundation of our teams so that we stay committed to the growth of our portfolio companies by not only assisting with strategy formulation, but also by going deep into execution, verification, and improvement. Our teams can offer tailored support to startups depending on their unique status, covering highly specialized areas such as Intellectual Property, Government Relations, Recruitment, and PR.
The startups that received more than one year of focused support from our teams tend to continue growing their businesses after the support period ends. Therefore, we will continue to enhance our hands-on support structure by adding new menus such as People Practice and support for corporate venture capital (CVC) funds.
Achieve a dominant position in CVC on the global stage
In the past year, approximately 100 investments have been made from the CVCs we manage. We have achieved the No.1* position on the global stage, with a big lead on the runner-up. There are multiple venture capital firms that offer VC as a Service like we do, mainly in the US and in Europe and Australia. However, GB stands out with the largest hands-on team and an overwhelming number of investments and exits.
With the global expansion of our CVC funds in scope, we are eager to proactively cooperate with large corporations considering investment in international startups and pursue business collaboration with foreign companies.
Furthermore, we will focus on launching CVC funds in new areas by assessing the scalability of businesses in such areas and their compatibility with GB’s sourcing capabilities. We will strive to achieve an overwhelming No.1 position in CVC.
*As of the end of August 2024. Based on GB’s research referring to Pitchbook data.
Become a global top-level data-driven venture capital firm
GB has an inhouse team of engineers who undertake system development including our proprietary CRM focused on venture capital operations. The team’s efforts have been recognized by Data-Driven VC, the world’s largest community that promotes data and technology-driven startup investment. We have been selected as one of the 190 firms that lead the transformation of venture capital firms. Going forward, we will continue to update our operations with the aim of achieving further heights as a data-driven venture capital firm.
Up until now, GB’s headcount has been growing proportional to our AUM. To break away from a labor-intensive model and achieve nonlinear growth, it is imperative to continue transforming ourselves into a fully data-driven venture capital firm. By leveraging AI and other technology, we are excited to transform other parts of the business including our sourcing and due diligence operations.
Work with the mindset of startups
To help give birth to startups that can compete on the global stage, we recognize the importance of embracing the startup mindset ourselves. The Japanese startup ecosystem still has a large room for development, and we are eager to put in all our efforts to play a role in its growth.
As we kick off 2025, GB will work as one team as we always have, striving to become a top tier venture capital firm on the global level, both in name and reality. We look forward to continuing working with you.