Natsumi Negishi

Natsumi Negishi is best known as a former Partner at STRIVE, the venture-capital firm formerly known as GREE Ventures. STRIVE’s official materials describe the firm as focused mainly on seed to early-stage startups, including seed, Series A, and Series B, with active investment in Japan, Southeast Asia, and India.

Before becoming a venture capitalist, Negishi worked in capital markets and investor relations. STRIVE’s profile interview says she was an analyst at Nomura Securities covering pre-IPO companies in healthcare and toiletries, supporting IPO preparation through business interviews, forecast monitoring, and equity-story discussions. Coral Capital and FastGrow profiles add that she previously worked as a public-equities analyst at Daiwa Securities, in IR at ASICS, and graduated from the University of Tokyo.

She joined GREE Ventures, now STRIVE, in 2016 and handled investments in Japan. Public profiles and her own writing identify her portfolio work with companies including KAKEHASHI, Minacolor, Lovegraph, Radiotalk, YOUTRUST, and NOIN. Her role was unusually hands-on: STRIVE’s interview says she supported portfolio companies through regular meetings and chat, and at times went deeper into finance, sales-leadership-type work, business planning, and internal problem-solving.

In January 2022, FastGrow reported that she left STRIVE at the end of December 2021 and joined MOLCURE, an AI drug-discovery startup that had been a STRIVE portfolio company. FastGrow reported she would initially work on finance and business development. MOLCURE press releases in 2025 list Natsumi Negishi as the media and business inquiry contact for the company.

• Invested from seed through early growth at STRIVE; STRIVE’s stated policy covers seed, Series A, and Series B startups.
• STRIVE’s model was lead-investor-oriented and hands-on: the firm describes its approach as riding “in the same boat” with entrepreneurs and supporting “every aspect of business growth.”
• Negishi’s own stated interest was in services that change user experience: she said she wanted to work on “ユーザー体験を変えるようなビジネス” and was attracted to offline experiences moving online.
• In her 2019 note, she said her portfolio included KAKEHASHI, Minacolor, and Lovegraph, and that she liked consumer businesses and user-experience-related services; she was also watching D2C, subscription, and new retail.
• In a FastGrow career panel, she said STRIVE often invested in companies of roughly 5–10 people and looked at market, position, and the attractiveness of the founder.
• Her support style emphasized tactical execution after investment: finance, hiring, business planning, sales support, and helping founders make better decisions without taking the decision away from them.