Toyota company Woven Capital appoints a new CIO and COO with the aim of achieving the ‘future of mobility’.

Sometimes, Michiko Kato thinks back on the biggest challenges in her life.

He once left everything in his hometown of Tokyo to study at Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, he decided to leave his job in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. That jump is what changed everything.

On Wednesday, Kato officially begins 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 Toyota subsidiary.

Woven Capital is part of Toyota’s growing company, which focuses on supporting innovators in mobility (including space, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving). It last announced $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also $800 million, launched in 2021), with plans to back at least 20 new Series B investments. Companies in its portfolio include satellite company Xona and defense infrastructure manufacturing company Machina Labs.

The company wants to find the “future leader of transportation,” he said, and aims to select companies that “partner with Toyota.”

“We can lead together, we can invest a little, or we can invest aggressively; we are trying to be flexible,” he said. And him? “I want to be involved. I want to be useful to startups. Also, I want to focus on creating partnerships.”

Kato this week is not alone in his promotion in the company. Mia Panzer is also moving from her business strategy role at one of Toyota’s technology subsidiaries to become Woven Capital’s COO. That means not one but two senior roles at the VC firm will be held by women, a sign of how the male-dominated world of finance and investment continues.

Historically, women have done (only marginally) better in moving up the ranks in CVCs than in traditional companies. The last concrete data, however, comes from a 2014 CBI report which stated that slightly less than 20% of top CVCs had women on their investment teams. The figure was compared, at the time, to that only 7% of partners in the top 100 firms were women.

Today, in business, that number hovers around 15.4%, suggesting that the percentage of women in investment roles at CVCs has increased, too.

Kato joined the company in 2020 as one of the first new hires at the time which was the newly formed Woven Capital. (From a subsidiary of Toyota.)

He spent 15 years in general investing, including in the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO of Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, he has led six investments (including an undisclosed one) in startups such as reusable rocket company Stoke and autonomous vehicle company Nuro, his first investment. He is very excited about aeromobility, physical AI, and hardware. “I think we can really change the way it’s done,” he said of his CVC vision.

Working with him will be Panzer, in the new role of COO. He will be taking on finance, operations, HR, and legal strategies. He said there are two things every CVC is always worried about – a downturn in business that kills deals and a poor relationship with the parent company. “My job is to help improve this,” he said.

He has been working with Ro Gupta, managing director of Woven Capital, since his days building mapping company Camera back in 2019. She joined the school when she was three months pregnant with her first child to manage finances. Previously, he was at Goldman and then at the animal health firm Independent Pet Partners (IPP). He said he was not really willing to leave his job at IPP but decided to give Gupta and Kamera a chance.

“I really like being part of the first world,” he said.

A subsidiary of Toyota tech then bought Carmera (an auction he helped run), and Gupta and Panzer joined that team. In December 2025, he became the managing director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer. Kato and Panzer report to the Guptas.

At first, Panzer didn’t think she was fully qualified for it, but then she thought about how women always say they’re not fully qualified for the job, while men just jump in and do it. She reflected on a career filled with assumptions about herself, from a college recruiter who didn’t think she’d have the technical knowledge because she was a woman, to a friend at Goldman who told her she wasn’t competitive for a promotion because she was a woman.

He also decided to jump.

“We talk a lot about the Japanese concept of mill where you focus on trying to find something you’re good at, something you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for,” he said, adding that it felt like generations of his family had worked in auto parts.