Introducting Hokkaido

Blending natural beauty with a rapidly evolving ecosystem, Hokkaido is quickly emerging as one of Japan’s key hubs for tech and innovation. Known for its agriculture, seafood, and forestry industries, this northern region is now attracting biotech, IT, space tech, and automotive companies and investors looking for growth in Asia.

Every entrepreneur is trying to figure out where is the best place in Asia to start a company … so there’s a real opportunity to attract great talent and to incentivize the local talent in Japan.— Ben Horowitz

My connection with Japan’s startup ecosystem

Through a career spanning 15 years and counting, my work has always revolved around building relationships, expanding global growth, creatively reaching customers, and generating awareness and engagement for exceptional products and services.

My journey linking Nordic and Japanese entrepreneurs began in 2017 while I was a part of the founding team at Funderbeam (an Estonian high-growth startup). During a period of high user growth, I serendipitously sparked a connection with Hiroyuki Fukasawa (a user of Funderbeam at the time) which became a valued long-term relationship. Additionally, thanks to Estonian and long-time resident of Japan, Raul Allikivi, I was able to host several Japanese delegations at our office in Tallinn. Again, via manufactured fortune, we were featured in WIRED Japan. This feature led to me discovering a presentation on Twitter (now X) that included a photograph of one of my delegation presentation decks. After my follow-up and discovery of who gave this presentation, Funderbeam received direct investments from Japan’s Mistletoe Inc. and Taizo Son—kickstarting a lot of business travel to Japan.

Before this, my ties to Japan were shaped by family. My aunt’s husband, Bruce Kumushiro, a Hawaiian of Japanese heritage, introduced me to Japanese culture through visits to Oahu. Through his influence, I gained a deep appreciation of Japanese traditions.

These experiences enriched my professional and personal relationships and made Japan a central and growing part of my career.

Hokkaido as a startup ecosystem

In Hokkaido, the frontier spirit that was fostered during the history of its development since the Meiji era has enabled people to take on new challenges more readily.
—Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism

Hokkaido has been striving to evolve its startup ecosystem over the past few years. As such, they have set ambitious goals and have shown great capabilities in delivering on these. They achieve this similarly to other startup ecosystems—leveraging a combination of governmental support, university engagement, access to funding, and a strong support network of founders, ecosystem builders, tech talent, etc.

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