Jonathan M. Hayashi

Jonathan is a multi-lingual venture capitalist and entrepreneur with engineering and banking background. 【Multi-lingual Venture Capitalist and Entrepreneur with Engineering and Finance background.】 - - Grew up in China and Japan. Double major of Optical Engineering and Financial Economics at University of Rochester in New York. I'm fluent in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Cantonese. - - After college, I joined one of the top 3 investment banks in Japan, and later on started my VC career in one of the largest venture capital firms in Japan, SBI Investment. I invested in 16 companies, sat on the board of 6 companies, and executed 2 exits with capital gain of about USD 13M. In 2019, I was selected to be on Forbes Midas List. - - I moved to Taiwan and joined Cornerstone Ventures, where I started to look at much earlier stage. In early 2021 I joined Infinity Ventures (now Headline Asia), where I invest in early stage startups in Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. More recently, we set up a crypto fund, Infinity Ventures Crypto. Beside investments, I also participated incubation of several startups at Headline Asia. - - I have founded BACKSEAT, the pioneer of embedded finance in the crypto industry of Japan. 【Major Portfolio】 - - Ripple, Rapyd, Tokopedia, Onfido, Ralali, Amartha, Gorilla Technology, SureCash, Mfine, Securitize, AsiaYo, Moove, Pickupp, Nudge, JPYC, Intellect, Nanakusa (SBINFT), FuelHash, Nanameue (Yay), Doublejump.Tokyo, OASYS, Financie, InsureDAO, J-Tamas, Minitt, Warashibe, YGG Japan, LUCA. 【Motto】 I believe Entrepreneurs should be the protagonists; and Venture Capitalists should be the "Kuroko".