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

Yumiko Murakami (MBA 1994), Miwa Seki (MBA 1993), and Kathy Matsui shared the same birthday month and year, so they started an annual birthday get-together to reflect on the year ahead. Work was always a hot topic: The women had built strong careers and 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, after 20 years in finance, with stints at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. Seki also had spent 20 years 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 birthday-celebration evenings, the group frequently kicked around the notion that something was seemingly missing in Japan’s financial world. They couldn’t put their collective finger on it—not until, that is, they built their own VC firm.

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

In addition to their birthdays (and the fact that their maiden names all begin with the letter M, which inspired the company’s name), the women had all been raised on entrepreneurship. Murakami’s mother had started a company in her 40s. Matsu’s parents, immigrants, founded one of the largest flower growers in the United States. Seki’s parents had built one of the largest chocolate factories in Japan. “Each of us had grown up watching our parents struggle but also successfully grow their own businesses,” Murakami explains. “We grew up with a tremendous amount of respect for entrepreneurs.”

MPower invests in companies, in Japan and beyond, that focus on what the team calls “tech-enabled sustainable living.” That could mean ESG in its traditional forms, such as climate change, health care technology, or environmental tech. But MPower 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 the core-value system and management strategy,” notes Murakami. “To do that, we help our portfolio companies identify their ESG materialities, targets, and KPIs. Before signing a check, we require the founder to pledge the company’s commitment to implement these ESG elements.”

MPower’s first three investments reflect the firm’s wide range: WOVN Technologies, a group that produces a website and associated app that allows organizations to develop and manage up-to-date multilingual websites, granting anyone access to content; US-based Jupiter, the leading provider of predictive data and analytics for climate risk and resilience; and Unifa, which provides AI technology that helps childcare providers track intellectual growth among children and facilitates the entry of more women to enter Japan’s workforce.

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,” says Seki. “We want to prove that we can maximize the return by installing ESG thinking in younger companies and, hopefully, nurture global startups from Japan.”

In a Japanese business culture still widely dominated by men, gender has proven to be an unforeseen asset: “We just happened to share the same values. We happened to share the same passion. We happened to share the same mission. It didn’t really matter whether we were women or men,” Murakami clarifies. “But when we started to talk to potential investors, their response was pretty amazing. First of all, they couldn’t believe women were doing it. We would go to executive board rooms—we were on one side of the table and, on the other side, it was older men with gray hair. That whole scene was something they have never experienced before. So we realized, ‘Oh, wow, this is actually something new.’”

MPower also has edge with a wider pool of potential investment opportunities as other female-led companies seek them out. Though they don’t have a gender mandate, the company’s leaders know that being the first in their space means they have a responsibility: “We really try to nourish networks within the female entrepreneur space in Japan,” says Murakami.

It’s also been good for marketing purposes. “People pay attention to MPower because we’re the first female-led, ESG fund,” Murakami concludes, “but hopefully we’re not going to be the only one. Hopefully, there’ll be more.”

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