Michiko Kato sometimes reflects on the great challenges of her life.
She once abandoned everything in Tokyo, where she was born and raised, to enroll at Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave behind a stable career in finance and embark on the rugged path of startup life. That jump changed everything.
On Wednesday, Kato will officially take on his biggest 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 Toyota's growth-stage venture capital arm focused on supporting founders building mobility (space, cybersecurity, autonomous driving, etc.). The firm last announced the creation of its $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also $800 million, was launched in 2021) and plans to back at least 20 new Series B investments. The company's portfolio includes companies such as satellite company Xona and defense manufacturing infrastructure company Machinena Labs.
He said the company is looking for “future leaders in mobility” and aims to select companies that will become “cooperation partners with Toyota.”
“We can co-lead, we can make small investments, we can make active investments. We try to be flexible,” she said. And what about her? “I want to be practical. I want to be of value to startups. And I want to get serious about building partnerships.”
Kato isn't the only person getting promoted at the company this week. Mia Panzer will also move from a business strategy role at one of Toyota's technology subsidiaries to chief operating officer at Woven Capital. This means that not one but two of the corporate venture capital (CVC) firm's top positions will be held by women, demonstrating how the male-dominated world of finance and investment has progressed.
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Historically, women have been (slightly) more successful in advancing in CVCs than in traditional venture firms. However, the last piece of concrete data comes from a 2014 CBI report, which states that just under 20% of top CVCs have women on their investment teams. This figure was compared to the fact that at the time, only 7% of partners in the top 100 venture firms were women.
Currently, in the venture industry, that number hovers around 15.4%, suggesting that the proportion of women in investment roles in CVCs is also increasing.
Mr. Kato joined the company in 2020 as one of the first new employees at then-newly spun-out Woven Capital. (It was spun off from an internal Toyota subsidiary.)
She has spent 15 years across investments, including on the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO at Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, she has led six investments (including several undisclosed ones) in startups, including reusable rocket company Stoke and her first investment, self-driving car company Nuro. The areas she is most excited about are air mobility, physics AI, and hardware. “I think we can fundamentally change the way manufacturing is done,” she said of CVC's vision.
Working alongside her will be Panzer in the newly created role of COO. She will take over finance, operations, human resources and legal strategy. She said there are two things that every CVC is always concerned about. It's the corporate slowdown and disagreements with the parent company that kill deals. “My job is basically to help develop this,” she said.
She has been working with Woven Capital Managing Director Ro Gupta since 2019, when she launched mapping company Camera. She joined the startup while three months pregnant with her first child to run finance. Previously, she worked at Goldman and then at independent pet partners (IPP), a pet wellness company. She said she never really wanted to quit her job at IPP, but decided to give Mr. Gupta and Mr. Camera a chance.
“I really like being part of the startup world,” she said.
Then Toyota's technology subsidiary acquired Carmela (she helped facilitate the sale), and Gupta and Panzer joined the division. In December 2025, he became Managing Director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer along. Cato and Panzer report to Gupta.
At first, Panzer didn't think she was qualified enough, but then she thought about how women always say they aren't qualified enough to get a job, but men just jump in and do the job. She reflected on a career filled with assumptions about her, from a college recruiter who didn't think she had technical knowledge because she was a woman, to a friend at Goldman who told her she wasn't a contender for a promotion because she was a woman.
She decided to jump in too.
“We often talk about the Japanese concept of ikigai, which is focusing on what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and finding reward,” she says, adding that her family has worked in auto parts for generations and feels like it's come full circle. “I always tell other women, 'Don't expect too much,'” she says. “It’s easy to overdeliver.”