Pangaea Ventures and Hakuhodo sign comprehensive partnership agreement to fuel hard tech innovation
Pangaea Partner Andrew Haughian to speak at the Global Deep Tech VC Seminar on Feb. 12
Pangaea Ventures is expanding its efforts to fuel hard tech innovation in Japan through a new comprehensive partnership with Hakuhodo Inc., one of Japan’s leading integrated marketing and innovation companies. The agreement, signed in December 2025 and announced today, is designed to make it easier for Japanese corporations to collaborate with leading hard tech startups from around the world, while giving founders a more direct path into one of the most sophisticated industrial ecosystems on the planet.
Hard tech sits at the center of some of Japan’s most pressing priorities: decarbonization, resource efficiency, and the resilience of critical supply chains. Yet the very qualities that make advanced materials, chemistry, and biology so powerful also make them challenging to assess, especially for teams that do not live in these disciplines every day. Long development cycles, complex proof‑of‑concept (PoC) design, and highly specialized technical risk can slow decision making and stall otherwise promising collaborations between startups and large enterprises.
Pangaea and Hakuhodo are uniting to help close that gap. Under the partnership, Pangaea will connect Hakuhodo’s network of Japanese corporates with a curated pipeline of globally leading hard tech startups, and share the investment and partnership logic we have refined over twenty‑five years of evaluating more than a thousand opportunities each year across materials, bio, semiconductors, and related fields. Hakuhodo, in turn, will bring its Sei-katsu-sha Insight* philosophy and creative and marketing capabilities to help Japanese companies translate these collaborations into new businesses and offerings that create transformational value.
Pangaea’s Participation in the Second Global Deep Tech VC Seminar
One of the first visible outcomes of the partnership will be Pangaea Partner Andrew Haughian’s participation in the Second Global Deep Tech VC Seminar on February 12, 2026, a webinar series jointly organized by Hakuhodo’s MIRAI Design Unit and Corundum Systems Biology Inc. In a session titled “How We Select the Top 1% of Deep Tech Startups (Out of 1,200 We Review Each Year),” Andrew will walk through how Pangaea structures its evaluation frameworks, where past clean tech cycles fell short, and what Japanese companies can do differently when designing evaluations, PoCs, and roadmaps with hard tech partners.
For Japanese corporates, the goal is not just better visibility into global dealflow, but a more confident way of making decisions in new technical domains. For founders, it is about opening a two‑way bridge into Japan that combines capital, technical collaboration, and customer engagement, rather than one‑off pilots.
By pairing Pangaea’s sector‑specific hard tech mastery with Hakuhodo’s market insight and corporate relationships, this partnership aims to turn more of today’s promising science into tomorrow’s industrial and planetary health outcomes.
Click here for webinar registration.
Click here for the full press release on Hakuhodo’s website.
* “Sei-katsu-sha” is a term Hakuhodo uses to describe people not simply as consumers, but as fully rounded individuals with their own lifestyles, aspirations and dreams.