KEI NAGASAWA

Nagasawa started in the old economy. He worked in M&A advisory at Mitsubishi Corporation, covering energy, retail, and food.

In 2007 he moved to Goldman Sachs in the investment banking division, running M&A and IPO deals for tech companies across Tokyo and San Francisco. That Silicon Valley exposure mattered.

He then joined Mercari, the marketplace app that let people sell their old stuff straight from their phones. As CFO he raised the capital that made Mercari Japan's first unicorn and took it public in 2018.

In 2020 he left to build his own thing.

Mercari is the big one. Nagasawa was CFO of the secondhand marketplace app during its rise from startup to public company.

Before that he spent years at Goldman Sachs and Mitsubishi Corporation on the deal side. Now he runs Minerva Growth Partners, the growth-equity fund he co-founded in 2020 with former Morgan Stanley banker Kensuke Murashima.

Minerva writes checks of roughly one to three billion yen into Japanese startups that already have real revenue.

Nagasawa invests at the growth stage, not the risky early days. He looks for companies that have already proven people want what they sell.

In plain terms, he wants evidence before he writes a check. Minerva targets startups with product-market fit and healthy unit economics that can grow toward ten billion yen in sales.

Think of him less as a lottery-ticket buyer and more as the person who shows up once the business works but needs fuel to get bigger. His focus is consumer internet, B2B software, healthtech, and fintech.

The win is Mercari's IPO. Nagasawa was CFO when the secondhand-marketplace app went public in June 2018 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, raising around $1.1 billion.

It was the biggest tech IPO in Japan that year and made Mercari the country's first unicorn to reach the public market. For a CFO, taking a company from private startup to public listing is the headline achievement.

He did it with a Japanese consumer app in a market that had produced very few of them. That is the credential the rest of his career is built on.

There is no public blow-up on Nagasawa's record, which is partly the point of how he works. If you want to name the biggest risk he has taken, it is Minerva itself.

He left a secure, high-status CFO job to raise a first-time growth fund in Japan, a country without a deep bench of late-stage investors to copy. First-time funds are hard.

Plenty never raise a second one. Whether his timing and thesis pay off is still an open question, and that uncertainty is the closest thing to an unresolved bet on his record.

His core belief is that Japan builds good companies and then fails them at the finish line. Founders can raise seed money and reach product-market fit, but the big growth checks are scarce at home, so promising firms stall or sell too early.

Minerva exists to fill that gap. Nagasawa's rule is simple.

Back proven businesses, hand them enough capital to actually scale, and work next to the founders instead of just wiring money and disappearing. The tagline he built the firm on is that they invest in partnerships to drive growth.

Nagasawa keeps his family life out of the public eye, which is common for Japanese finance executives. What is on the record is his schooling and his career, not his home life.

He is Japanese, based in Tokyo, and spent chunks of his Goldman Sachs years working between Tokyo and San Francisco. Beyond that, he has not turned himself into a public personality the way some founders do.

He lets the deals do the talking.

Nagasawa did his undergraduate degree at Keio University, one of Japan's top private universities and a traditional feeder into finance and business. He later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in the United States.

Booth is known for its hard-nosed, data-first take on finance. That training shows up in how he invests.

Evidence first, hype later.

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