Miwa Seki (left) and Yumiko Murakami (Photo by Shoko Takayasu)

Yumiko Murakami (MBA 1994), Miwa Seki (MBA 1993), and Kathy Matsui share the same month and year of birth, so the friends started an annual birthday get-together to reflect on the year ahead. Work was always a hot topic of discussion. Each woman had built a strong career, and they had continued to connect with one another along the way. Murakami was with OECD Tokyo Center, leading discussions on economic policy issues with government and business leaders in Asia, having spent 20 years in finance with companies like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Seki also had a 20-year career in finance, working for Morgan Stanley and leading the Japan office of Clay Finlay, a New York–based asset management company. Matsui was the vice chair for Goldman Sachs Japan and the chief Japan equity strategist.

On these evenings, they kicked around the notion that something was missing in Japan’s financial world. They couldn’t quite put their fingers on it—not until, that is, they built their own VC firm, MPower Partners.

To be clear, the trio did not set out to create the first female-led venture capital firm in Japan. Nor had they planned to become the first firm in Japan focused on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) solutions. Yet they achieved both distinctions in May 2021 with MPower, focusing on what they considered an untapped pool of talent in Japan: young entrepreneurs making a difference with ESG.

The companies MPower invests in focus on what the team calls “tech-enabled sustainable living,” which could mean companies directly focused on ESG in its traditional forms of climate change, health care technology, or environmental tech. All are good investments for MPower, but the company also expands that definition: “We actually take one more step and say that it doesn’t matter whether a business is directly in an ESG field, but that ESG elements should be integrated into its core value system and management strategy.”

While MPower Partners continues to offer investment from its first fund, Seki has been mulling a new fund focused solely on female-run enterprises. “I would like to launch the second fund in a couple of years, then possibly a third, and maybe the fourth to get to a billion dollars. We want to prove that we can maximize the return by installing ESG-thinking in younger companies and, hopefully, nurture global startups from Japan.”

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