Z Venture Capital

Key Areas of Focus in Japan for 2026

2025 was a year of real progress for Z Venture Capital (ZVC). We grew meaningfully across investment scale, geographic reach, and focus areas—investing in 51 companies, launching ZVC Fund II, and opening our San Francisco office. These milestones strengthened our ability to partner with founders around the world and support them over the long term.

With this foundation in place, how is ZVC thinking about the year ahead? In this column series, members of our investment team from each region share the themes and sectors they are focused on in 2026, shaped by their on-the-ground perspectives and individual conviction. We begin with Japan.

For the past 15 years or so, “mobile first” has been a core assumption across the technology industry. There’s probably no need to explain how starting from smartphones fundamentally reshaped how products are built, how users behave, and even how entire industries are structured.

Today, we’re approaching a turning point that feels just as significant—if not more so. Across the internet, blog posts are now written and edited by AI. On X, replies are increasingly filled with automated AI-generated posts. On TikTok and YouTube, people are consuming AI-created content without giving it a second thought. This isn’t simply about learning how to use AI. The underlying assumptions of how our economy is designed are beginning to shift.

At its simplest, economic activity is a flow: data, resources, and context come in; judgment, reasoning, and coordination happen in the middle; and value comes out. Historically, the main constraint has been that middle layer. While resources and infrastructure have always mattered, I believe what truly limited speed and scale was human processing capacity—how quickly people could understand information and combine it into decisions.

Advances in AI, especially large language models, are challenging this assumption. The cost of “intelligence” is no longer tied exclusively to humans. Processing capacity hasn’t become infinite, but its center of gravity is clearly moving from people to systems. Despite this, we’re still largely operating under the idea that “AI is a tool.” Most software, organizational structures, and business processes assume that humans understand, decide, and execute, with AI playing a supporting role.

What needs to be true for an AI-centric economy to function as a real, self-sustaining system?

First, we need to move beyond the assumption that AI is merely a tool. That framing belongs to an earlier phase of adoption. In an AI-native era, the premise itself changes: AI performs the work, while humans set intent, constraints, and accountability. Economic activity is no longer driven by step-by-step human operation, but by systems designed to execute outcomes autonomously once objectives are defined.

In this world, productivity comes not from operating software, but from designing intent. Up to now, societies, organizations, and institutions have been built around the limits of human understanding and decision-making speed. AI-native design replaces that foundation. Systems handle much of the situation analysis, judgment, and execution, while humans focus on outcomes, exceptions, and strategic direction. This goes beyond automation—it’s a shift in where decision-making and execution fundamentally live. Whether you simply fit AI into existing frameworks or rebuild rules and structures with AI as the starting point will lead to very different kinds of organizations, businesses, and services.

From this perspective, there are massive opportunities to rethink entire industries. What does media look like in an AI-native world? Advertising? Entertainment, commerce, education, or social networking? These questions have become the core of how I think about the future.

Of course, this transition won’t happen automatically. For AI to function as an economic actor, it needs an underlying system where it can pay, contract, and procure computing resources and services—and where the reliability of its decisions and outputs can be trusted.

That’s why I’m particularly focused on crypto and blockchain, as well as AI data governance and security. These aren’t passing trends to me; they’re foundational infrastructure for a world where AI can operate autonomously within the economy.

Many of these ideas may already be familiar. Still, I’m writing this because I feel that whether or not you actively embrace these assumptions is starting to create real divergence in how companies are designed and managed.

I’m not particularly interested in businesses that simply use AI to make existing operations more efficient. What excites me are companies built on the premise that AI itself runs the operations—and services that provide the economic, trust, and accountability layers that make that possible.

I don’t have all the answers. But I’d genuinely love to talk with entrepreneurs who are designing their businesses with AI not as a convenient feature, but as a core agent of value creation and decision-making. If this perspective resonates, please feel free to reach out.

Looking at recent developments in commerce, major e-commerce platforms like Amazon have been rapidly strengthening their AI capabilities, while OpenAI has begun rolling out features that allow users to complete purchases directly within Chat GPT. From a consumer standpoint, we see 2025 as the starting point of “Agentic Commerce”—an era in which AI agents increasingly handle purchasing decisions and transactions on behalf of users.

A similar shift is taking place in the B2B world. The phrase “SaaS is dead” reflects a broader transition: AI agents are no longer limited to areas like software development or customer support. They are now being embedded across a wide range of core business operations. As these agents become deeply integrated into operational workflows, we believe a future is emerging in which the discovery, procurement, and distribution of B2B products and services are increasingly automated and optimized by AI-driven systems.

We are already seeing early signals of this within ZVC’s portfolio. goooods, a wholesale marketplace, and Linc, a global talent-matching platform, have both delivered strong growth by leveraging generative AI—not just to improve operational efficiency for customers, but to automate and optimize the matching process itself.

Against this backdrop, we plan to actively invest in B2B Agentic Commerce platforms in 2026—platforms that use generative AI to seamlessly automate everything from operations to distribution and purchasing.

As U.S. tariff measures continue to tighten and the global order grows increasingly unstable, the question of how Japan can secure strategic autonomy and economic resilience has become more pressing than ever.

Against this backdrop, it is noteworthy that Japan’s new administration has identified 17 priority sectors for focused investment. Going forward, Japan must be clear about the areas in which it can build globally competitive industries, and deliberately concentrate capital and talent through close collaboration between the public and private sectors. We believe this moment calls for real conviction and long-term commitment.

At the same time, when we look at technologies such as generative AI and robotics—fields with the potential to fundamentally reshape how people work and live—the global frontier is currently being led by the United States and China. In large language models, exemplified by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, early leaders are already emerging. That said, this does not mean Japan is without a path to success.

One such path, in our view, lies in Physical AI.

In 2025, ZVC invested in Turing, which is developing a fully autonomous driving AI in Japan, and Zen Intelligence, which is building a foundational Spatial AI model for construction sites. Both companies are deeply grounded in Japan’s industrial strengths and real-world operating environments, and are focused on delivering tangible value through Physical AI. We strongly believe that technologies closely integrated with hardware and physical environments will be essential in advancing Japan’s industrial competitiveness to the next stage.

Physical AI will serve as a critical pillar of Japan’s future. Looking ahead to 2026, we will continue to invest not only in AI foundation models built on locally rooted data, but also in robotics technologies that integrate sensing capabilities, as well as cybersecurity—an indispensable layer in an increasingly AI-driven world.

— Creating Winning Paths Beyond “Creation”

Japanese content—spanning anime, manga, and games—enjoys world-class recognition and consumption globally. Yet when it comes to whether that popularity translates into meaningful economic returns for Japanese companies, the picture is far less clear.

According to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Entertainment and Creative Industries Strategy, less than 60% of overseas revenue generated by Japanese content is actually captured by Japanese firms. When unreported channels such as piracy are taken into account, the effective return is likely even lower.

This gap stems from structural challenges: pervasive piracy, the dominance of overseas platforms, and licensing structures that export IP at relatively low royalty rates. While significant value is created overseas, much of the economic upside fails to flow back to Japan. For a country running a substantial digital trade deficit, leaving this structure unaddressed represents a major missed opportunity—both economically and strategically.

Investing in startups that create new content and IP remains critically important. However, we are entering a phase where an equally important question must be addressed: how can Japan reconnect global demand for its IP with sustainable, long-term revenue at home?

We believe the ecosystem must also support startups that rethink IP not just as something to be created, but as something to be monetized, managed, and defended. Redesigning how IP value is captured—end to end, from creation to realization—will be essential to fully unlocking Japan’s cultural and economic potential.

— From “AI You Operate” to “AI That Is With You”

With the widespread adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, using AI has become part of everyday life. Even so, most AI today still lives inside apps or browser windows on our PCs and smartphones—something we actively open and interact with through chat-based interfaces. What I’m increasingly interested in is a different category altogether: **devices designed from the ground up for generative AI**—what we might call *generative AI–native devices*.

The shift here isn’t simply about new hardware or redesigned interfaces. It’s about AI that doesn’t wait to be prompted, but is always present—constantly understanding context, sensing what’s happening, and stepping in naturally when it makes sense to do so.

Globally, this space is still wide open. There’s no clear winner and no established playbook yet. This isn’t a problem that software alone—or hardware alone—can solve. It’s about designing a complete experience, including behavior, interaction, and presence. The white space here is enormous.

I’d love to connect with founders who want to help define what “normal” looks like in the generative AI era—and who are excited to build at that frontier together.

Please also take a look at our article on our investment performance in 2025.