About The Raising Sun
The Raising Sun explains Japanese venture capital in English for the institutions that fund it from abroad: limited partners, corporates and officials.
We track the full cycle: funds raised, rounds, exits and, where anyone discloses them, returns. We cover companies founded or mainly operating in Japan, including those with a Delaware parent.
Every record comes from a Japanese primary source, which we link, and we check it against the commercial registry where we can. Equity, debt and grants are recorded separately, and only equity counts in our totals.
Facts are unsigned; opinion is signed by Louis Christian and labelled as such. We correct errors within 48 hours.
Louis advises some startups and has links to Antares Ventures; records involving his interests are marked. Coverage cannot be bought.
Who we write for
- Foreign limited partners first,
- then corporates,
- then officials.
Independence
- No paid coverage. Companies and investors can't pay to be included or left out.
- Sponsors have no say over coverage.
Conflicts and disclosures
Records involving the editor's interests carry a disclosure on their page.
No disclosed interests in current records.
Methodology
What we include (draft rule)
- Company: founded in, or mainly operating in, Japan, including companies with a Delaware or other foreign parent.
- Round (provisional): every deep-tech round of any size, plus every other round of ¥500M or more (equity if known, otherwise the announced total), announced from 1 Jul 2026. Rounds below the threshold that we already hold are still listed but marked out of scope, and they don't count towards the headline.
- Deep tech means the core product depends on new science or engineering: fusion and energy hardware, space, semiconductors and photonics, quantum, robotics, biotech and medtech, and advanced materials.
- Source: each round must have a primary source: the company's own release (PR TIMES, @Press, ValuePress or its newsroom), an investor's release, or a TDnet filing. English news coverage is used only to find rounds.
How we count money
- Headline totals count disclosed primary equity only (shares, J-KISS, convertible notes). Loans, credit lines, grants and subsidies, and secondary share sales are shown on each round but not added in.
- Rounds whose release doesn't name the instrument count as equity and are tagged equity presumed.
- If a release gives only a combined equity-plus-debt figure, the round is listed but left out of equity totals ("incl. debt/other"). There are 50 such rounds right now.
- Total capital raised (incl. debt/other) is a second headline: the same in-scope rounds' verified equity, plus the full announced amount for mixed equity/debt rounds; undisclosed and cumulative-only rounds stay out.
- If a release gives only a cumulative figure (累計), we show it as cumulative and leave it out of totals unless the size of this round can be worked out from the release.
- We keep the original Japanese amount string (e.g. 「総額54.5億円」) next to the parsed yen figure. 1億円 = ¥100,000,000.
- Yen is the figure of record. USD appears only in tooltips and footnotes, converted at the ECB reference rate on the announcement date.
Flags and exclusions
No round is excluded because of its size. Every in-scope equity amount counts, whether it's a large Series A, a round above ¥10B or a single-investor round. Rounds are flagged only when the amount itself is uncertain:
- Sources disagree: both figures are shown. The round counts at the figure we chose, which is stated on the round page (e.g. Caddi at ¥10.2B equity).
- Only a cumulative or derived figure: shown, but left out of totals until the round's own amount is disclosed.
- Equity mixed with debt and no split given: shown, but left out of equity totals.
Left out of totals now (31): AZOO, esa, Tablecross (byFood), JPYC, bestat, CFOne, HerLifeLab, U-ZERO, MENOU, TriOrb, Sound Wave Innovation, FiT, movus technologies, UMITO, PathAhead, ONESTRUCTION, Porty, Sequential, MiRESSO, Anique, A-wave, AstroX, CommerceX Holdings, SHONAI, Startale, enechain, Bellface, Latera, Spectee, EMC Healthcare, Dwilar, plus 50 mixed equity/debt rounds.
Current totals
Headline equity: ¥208.72B of verified primary equity across 105 in-scope rounds. Total capital raised (incl. debt/other): ¥279.28B across 142 in-scope rounds. All listed rounds, including those out of scope: ¥219.16B across 158 equity-counted rounds.
Coverage
We test coverage against a benchmark sample: rounds named in Nikkei's weekly startup-funding roundups for five weeks (27–31 Jul, 31 Aug–4 Sep, 7–11 Sep, 14–18 Sep and 28 Sep–2 Oct 2026). Before the backfill, v1 had 17 of the 24 qualifying rounds in that sample (≈71%). The 7 missing rounds have since been added from their primary releases. Those roundups list only the "main" deals, so real coverage of all PR TIMES funding releases is lower. We'll publish a fuller audit as it's done.
Registry checks
Where the commercial registry (商業登記簿) has been checked, a round is marked registry-confirmed. None are yet.
Text
We record facts only (company, amount, instrument, date, investors, stage) and write every summary ourselves. We never copy or translate release text. Sources are fetched slowly and in line with each site's robots.txt.