Establishment of UMI I Investment Limited Partnership

On January 1, 2016, Universal Materials Incubator Co., Ltd. (UMI) established the UMI I Investment Limited Partnership (UMI I Fund) with a promised investment scale of more than 8 billion yen, and implemented an initial cutoff. The promised investment scale is scheduled to be expanded to around 10 billion to 11billion yen.

The material and chemical industries are large-scale industries that account for about 10% of all industries in Japan, and the innovations in many material technologies originating in Japan have supported other industries as well. Recently, amid the prosperity of the electronics and automotive industries in particular, the Japanese material and chemical industries have secured an increasingly strong position in the global market. At the same time, many material and chemical companies have struggled to achieve balanced profit structures during the growth process, and have been forced to create new businesses or to make changes to those profit structures. These industries have longer R&D cycles than other industries, however, and also lack the capital required to support these R&D operations and the human resources with specialized knowledge to undertake these activities. As such, many new businesses and promising technologies in the embryonic stage from large corporations, venture companies, and academia end up being hidden away, unable to be matched with optimum partners.

Based on these issues, the goal of the UMI I Fund is to establish a platform for the creation of new business, focusing on outstanding technologies and businesses at academic institutions, major corporations, and venture companies in the material and chemical industries, and to actively support business creation by serving as a receptacle for those businesses and technologies. The UMI I Fund also has ties to universities and other academic institutions with strengths in the material and chemical fields. This Fund will strive to be a venture capital fund that strengthens Japan’s technical capabilities by fostering the manpower responsible for new businesses, and contributes to creating industry structures that can compete in the global arena. To achieve this goal, we will put out calls for investments from a broad range of companies in the material and chemical industries and form investor teams with specialized knowledge, in order to provide hands-on support specializing in the stages from product development to the development of production technologies, which are obstacles in the creation of new businesses in the material and chemical industries in particular.

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the many parties who contributed to the establishment of the UMI I Investment Limited Partnership, and we look forward to your valued support of UMI in the future.