Sometimes, Michiko Kato thinks back on the great challenges of her life.
She once dropped everything in her native city of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave her career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. That jump is what changed everything.
On Wednesday, Kato officially assumes her greatest challenge yet — CIO of Toyota’s Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latter appointment makes her the first female CEO of a wholly owned Toyota subsidiary.
Woven Capital is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Toyota, focused on backing founders building in mobility (including space, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving). It last announced an $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also at a $800 million, launched in 2021), with plans to back at least 20 new Series B investments. Companies in its portfolio include the satellite company Xona and the defense manufacturing infrastructure company Machina Labs.
The firm seeks to find the “future leader of mobility,” she said, and aims to pick companies that are “collaboration partners with Toyota.”
“We can co-lead, we can make small investments, or we can do an aggressive investment; we try to be flexible,” she said. And as for her? “I want to be hands-on. I want to be valuable to startups. And, I want to really focus on the partnership creation.”
Kato this week is not alone in her promotion at the firm. Mia Panzer is also moving from her business strategy role at one of Toyota’s technology subsidiaries to become COO of Woven Capital. That means not one but two of the top roles at this corporate VC (CVC) firm will be held by women, a signal of how the male-dominated world of finance and investments is progressing.
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Historically, women have done (only a little bit) better at climbing the ranks at CVCs than at traditional venture firms. The last concrete data, however, comes from a 2014 CBI report that said that a little less than 20% of the top CVCs had women on their investing teams. The number was compared, at the time, to the fact that only 7% of partners at the top 100 venture firms were women.
Today, in venture, that number hovers around 15.4%, suggesting the percentage of women in investment roles at CVCs has increased, too.
Kato joined the firm back in 2020 as one of the first new hires for what was then the newly spun-out Woven Capital. (It spun out from an in-house subsidiary of Toyota.)
She’s spent 15 years in investing overall, including on the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO for the Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, she’s led six investments (including an undisclosed one) into startups like the reusable rocket company Stoke and the autonomous vehicle company Nuro, her first investment. She’s most excited by aeromobility, physical AI, and hardware. “I think we can fundamentally transform the way manufacturing is done,” she said of her vision for the CVC.
Working alongside her will be Panzer, in the newly formed COO role. She’s going to be taking over finance, operations, HR, and legal strategy. She said there are two things every CVC is always worried about — a corporate slowdown that kills deals and misalignment with the parent company. “My job is to essentially help with developing this through,” she said.
She’s been working with Ro Gupta, Woven Capital’s managing director, since his days building the mapping company Camera back in 2019. She joined that startup while three months pregnant with her first kid to run finance. Previously, she was at Goldman and then at the pet wellness company Independent Pet Partners (IPP). She said she wasn’t really looking to leave her job at IPP but decided to give Gupta and Camera a chance.
“I really like being part of the startup world,” she said.
Toyota’s tech subsidiary then purchased Carmera (a sale she helped facilitate), and Gupta and Panzer joined that division. In December 2025, he became 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 thought about how women always say they aren’t fully qualified for a job, while men just jump in and do it. She thought of a career full of assumptions about her, from the college recruiter who didn’t think she would have technical knowledge because she was a woman, to the friend at Goldman who told her she wasn’t his competition for promotion because she was a woman.
She decided to just jump in, too.
“We talk a lot about the Japanese concept of ikigai where you focus on trying to find something you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for,” she said, adding that it feels full circle as generations of her family have worked in automotive parts. “I always say to other women, ‘Let them have low expectations,” she said. “Easy to overdeliver.’”
