Sometimes Michiko Kato thinks about the great challenges of her life.
He once left his hometown of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, he decided to leave his career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. That jump changed everything.
On Wednesday, Kato officially takes on his biggest challenge yet – CIO of Toyota Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latter appointment makes her the first female CEO of a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota.
Woven Capital is Toyota’s growth venture capital arm. focuses on supporting founders building mobility (including space, cyber security and autonomous driving). It last announced an $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also worth $800 million, is set to launch in 2021), which it plans to support at least 20 new Series B investments. Companies in its portfolio include satellite company Xona and defense industry infrastructure company Machina Labs.
According to him, the company is trying to find “the future leader of mobility” and aims to select companies that are “cooperation partners with Toyota”.
“We can lead together, we can make small investments or we can make an aggressive investment; we try to be flexible,” he said. What about him? “I want to be hands-on. I want to be valuable to startups. And I want to really focus on creating partnerships.”
Kato is not alone in his promotion at the firm this week. Mia Panzer is also leaving a business strategy role at one of Toyota’s technology subsidiaries to become Woven Capital’s COO. This means that not one, but two, of the top positions at this corporate VC (CVC) firm will go to women, a sign of how the male-dominated world of finance and investing is evolving.
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Historically, women have done better (only slightly) at moving up the ranks at CVCs than at traditional venture firms. However, the latest concrete data comes from a 2014 CBI report showing that just under 20% of top CVCs have women on their investment teams. This number compared to the fact that at the time, only 7% of partners in the top 100 venture firms were women.
Today in the enterprise, this number is about 15.4%It also shows that the percentage of women in investment roles in CVCs is increasing.
Kato joined the firm in 2020 as one of the first new hires for the then-newly formed Woven Capital. (It came out of an internal subsidiary of Toyota.)
He has spent 15 years investing overall, including in the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO of Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, he has led six investments (including an undisclosed one) in startups, including his first investment, reusable rocket company Stoke, and autonomous car company Nuro. He is most excited about aeromobility, physical AI and hardware. “I think we can fundamentally change the way manufacturing is done,” he said of his vision for CVC.
Working alongside him will be Panzer, in the newly created role of COO. He will be responsible for finance, operations, HR and legal strategy. He said there are two things every CVC always worries about – a corporate slowdown that kills deals with the parent company and inconsistency. “My job is to help develop that,” he said.
He has been working with Ro Gupta, managing director of Woven Capital, since he founded the mapping company Camera in 2019. She joined the startup when she was three months pregnant with her first child, a financial manager. Previously, he was at Goldman and then at Independent Pet Partners (IPP), a pet health company. He said he didn’t really want to leave his job at IPP but decided to give Gupta and Camera a chance.
“I love being a part of the startup world,” he said.
Toyota’s technology subsidiary later bought Carmera (which he helped sell), and Gupta and Panzer joined the division. In December 2025, he became the managing director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer along. Kato and Panzer report to Gupta.
At first, Panzer didn’t think she was fully qualified, but then she realized that women were always told they weren’t quite right for a job, and men just jumped in and did it. From her college employer who didn’t think she would have the technical knowledge because she was a woman, to her friend at Goldman who told her she wasn’t competitive for a promotion because she was a woman, she thought about a career filled with assumptions.
He decided to go inside.
“We talk a lot about the Japanese concept double Where you try to find something you’re good at, something you love, something the world needs and something you can get paid for,” she says, adding that it’s come full circle because generations of her family have worked in the auto parts business. “I always tell other women, ‘Let their expectations be low.’ “It’s easy to overdeliver.”
