DNX Ventures recently hosted our annual B2B Summit in Tokyo, Japan. It was a big event with over 200 large enterprises, VCs, and startups attending in person and even more online. We feel excited every time about this event, as it is so important to facilitate the ecosystem coming together to learn and discuss important and ongoing trends and opportunities for innovation. It seemed to me like the number of valuable conversations that took place was exponential to the number of attendees. The event sessions and networking that took place throughout the day were both inspiring and thought provoking. It was truly fueling to take part in it all.
On the train back to Narita International Airport I decided to note down some reflections and takeaways from the event, to share with you all. Below follows the key points:
Japan B2B SaaS Market trends
A record amount of 19B USD was invested in B2B SaaS in Japan last year and this growth trend does not seem to slow down any time soon. The growth may be even higher than in other countries.
The last two years may have been an aberration in terms of free cash and high valuations, but for what’s next high quality business will be fine.
Opportunities in this kind of market, in addition to consolidation opportunities for the top quality businesses, could include more favorable conditions for hiring and retaining talent, as well as the possibility to avoid irrational competition from lower tier competitors. Especially for the acquisition of customers.
Cloud trends
The trend of migrating to cloud for enterprise is still very much ongoing - analyst reports, VC investments, and Enterprise C-level surveys point in the same direction: cloud is growing and will continue to grow.
With expedited migration plans comes growth pains or aftermath in the form of cost and deployment optimization challenges.
Lift-and-shift strategies and lack of cloud architecture skills in application teams have put a new pressure on C-level to get control of cloud costs and put auto-pilot optimization strategies in place.
CloudNatix was a company highlighted as leading innovation set out to help Enterprise in and post cloud migration.
Climate tech
DNX has been investing in Climate Tech for many years; we have learned great lessons and are now actively applying them to the next phase of our investment journey.
Climate change related catastrophes are happening with higher frequency and severity world-wide.
Iceye with its 20+ SAR satellite constellation in a repeat orbit is helping mitigate the suffering from these natural catastrophes
Overall, there were so many more topics covered, also during the networking events, but my personal takeaway is that Japan is moving and innovating like never before. Japan is particularly forward thinking when it comes to the circular economy - there will be great things to watch coming out of Japan in the next few years.