Venture Café Tokyo (English)

A community of a diverse group of innovators, including entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers.

Venture Café Tokyo is a community of entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and other diverse innovators with a vision of creating innovation in society. Venture Café Tokyo is a sister organization of Boston's Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), CIC was established in Boston in 2010 and has expanded to 10 cities worldwide.

The core feature of Venture Café Tokyo's program is the Thursday Gathering, held every Thursday at CIC Tokyo (Toranomon Hills). This event is open to all and it accommodates an average of 350 people each time. The program focuses on innovation, public-private partnerships, and entrepreneurship, and there is also time for interaction among speakers and participants. Detailed information on each event can be found here (Japanese Website).

There is also an event happening once or twice a year – ROCKET PITCH NIGHT. It’s an event for you to showcase your ideas and get feedback from experienced judges and audience members. The event is open to people of all backgrounds exploring new things (e.g. students and researchers in the idea phase, NPOs, startups in the fundraising phase, intrapreneurs, etc.), and about 1,000 people attend each time. The best team(s) will be awarded free use of the co-working space at CIC Tokyo.

Our Philosophy
Our mission is "connecting innovators to make something happen", and we aim to promote innovation by creating opportunities for people to connect with each other. It is therefore essential to build a space for people to gather and share ideas and a community as a "safety net" and "infrastructure" for those who take on challenges. Even when experiencing frustrations, people can always come back here and think about the next steps. Based on this philosophy, we focus on holding events important for community building in particular.

Recommended for
・People who want to take on challenges but haven’t made up their minds.
・People who have already been taking on challenges.
・People who are interested in innovation.
・People who want to find a vision for their career.
・Everyone is welcome.

What you can do here
Your experience will be centered on Learn, Connect, and Share explained below. However, what one may gain from Venture Café Tokyo depends on oneself.

Learn
For students who do not have a specific goal or challenge in mind but are interested in Venture Café Tokyo, we recommend attending the Thursday Gathering held every Thursday. Students can learn directly from a variety of speakers and participants, including people working in government and NPOs, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Connect
You may have surprising meet-ups with people at Thursday Gathering and other events. Not only can you gain inspiration from these encounters, but also opportunities to team up with them and even get investment. In fact, there have been members who found partners within this community to co-found start-ups.

Share
Students who want to increase the recognition of their activities and receive feedback can take advantage of opportunities such as Thursday Gathering and ROCKET PITCH NIGHT.

They can also get involved as ambassadors. Ambassadors are students and professionals who run Thursday Gatherings, facilitate the event, and guide new visitors to Venture Café Tokyo. To apply, please click here.