Sakae Asanuma

Sakae Asanuma founded Taiho Ventures in 2016, the corporate venture-arm of Taiho Pharmaceutical. Prior to joining Taiho, he was President and CEO at Astellas Venture Management as well as US Head of Astellas Innovation Management for five years since 2011. During his tenure at both Taiho and Astellas, he has established dozens of collaboration deals with both academia and biotech ventures, including several build-to-buy and company spin-outs. Prior to working at Astellas, he was General Manager at Yasuda Enterprise, a Japanese VC firm with $800M under management. Over the last two decades, he has invested in more than 50 companies, with more than half of them exiting via public offerings or M&A. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2000.