Sometimes, Michiko Kato looks back on the big challenges of her life.
She once left everything in her hometown of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave her career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. This jump is what changed everything.
On Wednesday, Kato officially takes on her biggest challenge yet – CIO of Toyota’s Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latest appointment makes her the first female CEO of a wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota.
Woven Capital is the growth stage venture capital arm of Toyota, focuses on supporting founders building on mobility (including space, cyber security and autonomous driving); It last announced an $800 million Fund II in August of last year (Fund I, also $800 million, launched in 2021), with plans to back at least 20 new Series B investments. Companies in its portfolio include satellite company Xona and defense infrastructure company Machina Labs.
The company seeks to find the “future leader of mobility,” he said, and aims to select companies that are “collaboration partners with Toyota.”
“We can advocate, we can make small investments or we can make an aggressive investment; we try to be flexible,” he said. And as for her? “I want to be hands-on. I want to be valuable to startups. And, I really want to focus on partnership building.”
Kato this week is not alone in her promotion in the company. Mia Panzer is also moving from a business strategy role at one of Toyota’s technology subsidiaries to become Woven Capital’s COO. That means not one but two of the top roles at this corporate VC (CVC) firm will be held by women, a sign of how the male-dominated world of finance and investing is moving forward.
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Historically, women have done (only marginally) better at climbing the ranks at CVCs than at traditional venture firms. The latest concrete figures, however, come from a 2014 CBI report which said just under 20% of top CVCs had women on their investment teams. The number compared, at the time, to the fact that only 7% of partners at the top 100 venture firms were women.
Today, in the project, this number hovers around 15.4%suggesting that the proportion of women in investment roles in CVCs has also increased.
Kato joined the company in 2020 as one of the first new hires for the then fledgling Woven Capital. (It arose from an internal subsidiary of Toyota.)
He has spent 15 years investing across the board, including in the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO for Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, it has led six investments (including an undisclosed one) in startups such as reusable rocket company Stoke and autonomous vehicle company Nuro, its first investment. She is most excited by aeronautics, physical AI and hardware. “I believe we can fundamentally transform the way manufacturing is done,” she said of her vision for CVC.
She will be joined by Panzer, in the newly created role of COO. He will take charge of finance, operations, human resources and legal strategy. He said there are two things every CVC always worries about – a corporate slowdown that kills deals and misalignment with the parent company. “My job is to actually help develop this issue,” he said.
She has been working with Ro Gupta, the CEO of Woven Capital, since she was building the mapping company Camera in 2019. She joined this startup while she was three months pregnant with her first child which she managed financially. Previously, he was at Goldman and then at pet wellness company Independent Pet Partners (IPP). She said she didn’t really want to leave her job at IPP, but decided to give Gupta and Camera a chance.
“I really like being part of the startup world,” he said.
Then, Toyota’s technology subsidiary bought Carmera (a sale that helped ease it), and Gupta and Panzer joined that division. In December 2025, he became CEO of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer with him. Cato and Pancher refer to Gupta.
At first, Panzer thought she wasn’t fully qualified, but then she thought about how women always say they’re not fully qualified for a job, while men just jump in and do it. She envisioned a career full of assumptions about her, from the college recruiter who didn’t think she’d have technical knowledge because she was a woman, to Goldman’s friend who told her she wasn’t his competition for a promotion because she was a woman.
She decided to jump too.
“We talk a lot about the Japanese idea ikigai where you focus on trying to find something you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs and what you can get paid for,” she said, adding that it’s full circle as generations of her family have worked in auto parts.
