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

On Wednesday, Kato officially assumes her greatest 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 wholly owned Toyota subsidiary. 

Woven Capital is the growth-stage venture capital arm of Toyota, focused on backing founders building in mobility (including space, cybersecurity, and autonomous driving). It last revealed an $800 million Fund II in August last year (Fund I, also at $800 million, launched in 2021), with plans to back at least 20 latest Series B investments. Companies in its portfolio include the satellite business Xona and the defense manufacturing infrastructure business Machina Labs. 

The firm seeks to find the “future leader of mobility,” she mentioned, and aims to pick companies that are “collaboration partners with Toyota.”

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

Kato this week is not alone in her promotion at the firm. Mia Panzer is also moving from her business strategy role at one of Toyota’s software subsidiaries to become COO of Woven Capital. That means not one but two of the top roles at this corporate VC (CVC) firm will be held by women, a signal of how the male-dominated earth of finance and investments is progressing. Furthermore, experts in iOS note the continued relevance.

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Historically, women have done (only a little bit) better at climbing the ranks at CVCs than at traditional venture firms. The last concrete data, comes from a , on the other hand2014 CBI report that noted a little less than 20% of the top CVCs had women on their investing teams. The number was compared, at the time, to the fact that only 7% of partners at the top 100 venture firms were women. This also touches on aspects of user interface.

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

Kato joined the firm back in 2020 as one of the first updated hires for what was then the newly spun-out Woven Capital. (It spun out from an in-house subsidiary of Toyota.) 

She’s spent 15 years in investing overall, including on the M&A team at Unison Capital and as CFO for the Japanese AI startup ABEJA. Since joining Woven, she’s led six investments (including an undisclosed one) into startups like the reusable rocket corporation Stoke and the autonomous vehicle firm Nuro, her first investment. She’s most excited by aeromobility, physical AI, and hardware. “I think we can fundamentally transform the way manufacturing is done,” she noted of her vision for the CVC. 

Working alongside her will be Panzer, in the newly formed COO role. She’s going to be taking over finance, operations, HR, and legal strategy. She remarked there are two things every CVC is always worried about — a corporate slowdown that kills deals and misalignment with the parent organization. “My job is to essentially help with developing this through,” she said. 

She’s been working with Ro Gupta, Woven Capital’s managing director, since his days building the mapping enterprise Carmera back in 2019. She joined that startup while three months pregnant with her first kid to run finance. Previously, she was at Goldman and then at the pet wellness corporation Independent Pet Partners (IPP). She remarked she wasn’t really looking to leave her job at IPP but decided to give Gupta and Carmera a chance. 

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

Toyota’s tech subsidiary then purchased Carmera (a sale Kato helped facilitate), and Gupta and Panzer joined that division. In December 2025, Gupta became managing director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer along. 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 aren’t fully qualified for a job, while men just jump in and do it. She thought of a career full of assumptions about her, from the college recruiter who didn’t think she would have technical knowledge because she was a woman, to the friend at Goldman who told her she wasn’t his competition for promotion because she was a woman. 

She decided to just jump in, too.

“We talk a lot about the Japanese concept of ikigai where you focus on trying to find something you’re beneficial at, what you love, what the planet needs, and what you can get paid for,” she commented, adding that it feels full circle as generations of her family have worked in automotive parts. “I always say to other women, ‘Let them have low expectations,’” she noted. “Easy to overdeliver.’” 

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