Toyota’s Woven Capital appoints new CIO and COO to find “future of mobility”

Sometimes, Michiko Kato remembers the problems she faced in her life.

At one point he left everything in his hometown of Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, he decided to leave his job in the financial world to enter the world of startups. That jump was the one that changed everything.

On Wednesday, Kato will take on his biggest challenge yet – CIO of Toyota Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latter appointment makes her the first female CEO of a Toyota subsidiary.

Woven Capital is part of Toyota’s growth, aimed at the founders to support building on mobility (including location, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving). It announced the last $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also $800 million, launched in 2021), with plans to return at least 20 Series B funds. Companies in its portfolio include the satellite company Xona and the security company Machina Labs.

The company wants to find “the future leader of transportation,” he said, and wants to choose companies that are “compatible with Toyota.”

“We can lead, we can make small investments, or we can make aggressive investments; we try to be flexible,” he said. And him? “I want to be helpful. I want to be important in the beginning. And, I want to focus on building partnerships.”

Kato this week is not alone in his promotion of the firm. Mia Panzer is also leaving her business role at one of Toyota’s technology divisions to become Woven Capital’s COO. This means that not one but two of the top positions at this VC firm will be held by women, which shows how the world of finance and business is dominated by men.

Historically, women have been more successful (at least slightly) in launching CVCs than in traditional companies. The last concrete data, however, comes from a 2014 CBI report which stated that at least 20% of top CVCs had women on their investment teams. The figure compared, at the time, that only 7% of the employees of the top 100 companies were women.

Today, fortunately, that number hovers around 15.4%showing that the number of women with financial positions at CVC has increased, too.

Kato joined the company in 2020 as one of the first hires of the then newly launched Woven Capital. (It came out of a subsidiary of Toyota.)

He has spent 15 years in private equity, including on the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO at Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, he has led six ventures (including an incredible one) starting with renewables rocket company Stoke and independent startup Nuro, his first investment. He is particularly interested in aviation, physical AI, and weapons. “I think we can change the way manufacturing is done,” he said of his CVC vision.

Working alongside him will be Panzer, in the new role of COO. They will handle finance, operations, HR, and legal processes. He said that there are two things that every CVC is always worried about – the decline of the company which kills the contracts and the conflict with the parent company. “My job is to help develop this,” he said.

She has been working with Ro Gupta, Managing Director of Woven Capital, since her days building the mapping company Kamera in 2019. She joined the startup when she was three months pregnant with her first child to run the finance business. Previously, he was at Goldman and then at independent pet partners (IPP). He said he did not want to resign from IPP but decided to give Gupta and Camera a chance.

“I really like being in the startup world,” he said.

Toyota’s technology subsidiary then bought the Carmera (the sale of which it assisted), and Gupta and Panzer joined the division. In December 2025, he became the managing director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer. Kato and Panzer tell Gupta.

At first, Panzer didn’t think she was qualified, but then she thought about how women always say they’re not qualified for the job, while men just jump in and do it. She thought about a job full of opinions about her, from a college recruiter who didn’t think she had the technical knowledge because she was a woman, to a colleague at Goldman who told her she wasn’t competitive for a promotion because she was a woman.

He decided to jump in too.

“We talk a lot about the concept of Japan it is where you focus on trying to find what you’re good at, what you love, what the world wants, and what you can pay for it,” he said, adding that it feels like generations of his family have worked in the automotive industry.