Toyota’s Woven Capital hires new CIO and COO in bid to create ‘future of mobility’

Sometimes, Michiko Kato thinks about the great challenges she has faced in her life.

She once gave up everything in her native Tokyo to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. One day, she decided to leave her career in the stable world of finance to enter the rocky terrain of startup life. That jump is what changed everything.

On Wednesday, Kato officially takes on her biggest challenge yet — IT director at Toyota’s Woven Capital and CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. The latest appointment makes her the first female CEO of a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota.

Woven Capital is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Toyota, focused on supporting founders in the mobility space (including space, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving). It last announced the $800 million second fund in August last year (the first fund, also worth $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 manufacturing infrastructure company Machina Labs.

She said that the company seeks to find the “future leader of mobility” and aims to select companies that “collaborate with Toyota.”

“We can co-lead, we can make small investments, or we can make an aggressive investment; we try to be flexible,” she said. And as for her? “I want to be hands-on. I want to be valuable to startups. And I want to really focus on creating the partnership.”

Kato is not alone in her promotion at the company this week. Mia Panzer is also moving from her strategy role at one of Toyota’s technology businesses to become COO at Woven Capital. This means that women will hold not one, but two of the top roles at this venture capital firm, a sign of how far the male-dominated world of finance and investments has come.

Historically, women have done better (only slightly) at climbing the ranks at venture capital firms than at traditional venture firms. However, the most recent concrete data comes from a 2014 CBI report that stated that just under 20% of top venture capitalists include women on their investment teams. This figure was compared, at the time, to the fact that only 7% of partners at the 100 largest investment firms were women.

Today, in the venture space, that number is around 15.4%, suggesting that the proportion of women in investment roles at venture capital firms has also increased.

Kato joined the firm in 2020 as one of the first new hires from what was then the newly formed Woven Capital. (It spun out of an internal subsidiary of Toyota.)

She has spent 15 years in investing generally, including on the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO of Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, she has led six investments (including an undisclosed investment) in startups such as reusable rocket company Stoke and autonomous vehicle company Nuro, her first investment. She is most passionate about air mobility, physical AI, and hardware. “I believe we can fundamentally change the way manufacturing is done,” she said of her vision for CVC.

She will be working alongside Panzer, in the newly formed COO role. You will handle finance, operations, human resources and legal strategy. She said there are two things that every CVC firm always worries about – a company slowdown that kills deals and a lack of alignment with the parent company. “My job is to basically help develop this,” she said.

She has been working with Ro Gupta, managing director of Woven Capital, since his days starting mapping company Camera in 2019. She joined the startup while three months pregnant with her first child to manage the finances. She previously worked at Goldman and then at pet health company Independent Pet Partners (IPP). She said she wasn’t really looking to leave her job at IPP but decided to give Gupta and Camera a chance.

“I really love being part of the startup world,” she said.

Toyota’s technology subsidiary then bought Carmera (a sale it helped facilitate), and Gupta and Panzer joined that division. In December 2025, he became managing director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer with him. Kato and Panzer report to Gupta.

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

I decided to jump in too.

“We talk a lot about the Japanese concept of ikigai “Where you focus on trying to find something that you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, what you can get paid for,” she said, adding that it feels like a full circle as generations of her family have worked in auto parts. “I always tell other women, ‘Let them have low expectations. It’s easy to over-deliver.”