Toyota's Woven Capital Just Made History — Two Women Now Lead Its Top Roles
Toyota's growth-stage venture capital arm, Woven Capital, has appointed two women to its most senior leadership positions. Michiko Kato steps in as Chief Investment Officer, while Mia Panzer takes on the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer. This move is turning heads across the venture capital world — and for good reason.
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| Credit: Woven Capital |
Who Is Michiko Kato — and Why Her Story Matters
Michiko Kato did not take a straight road to the top. Born and raised in Tokyo, she stepped away from the stability of Japan's finance world to attend Harvard Business School in Massachusetts — a bold, life-altering decision. Later, she left the predictable world of corporate finance entirely to enter the volatile startup ecosystem. That leap would define her career.
She joined Woven Capital in 2020 as one of its very first hires, when the firm had just been spun out from an in-house Toyota subsidiary. Over the past five years, she has led six investments into companies operating in aerospace, autonomous vehicles, and advanced manufacturing. Her first investment was into Nuro, an autonomous vehicle company, and she has since backed Stoke Space, a reusable rocket startup, among others.
With her new CIO title, Kato also becomes the first female CEO of a wholly owned Toyota subsidiary through her parallel appointment as CEO of Toyota Invention Partners. That historic distinction is not lost on her — but she is already looking ahead.
"I want to be hands-on. I want to be valuable to startups. And I want to really focus on partnership creation," Kato said.
Her focus areas going forward are aeromobility, physical AI, and hardware — sectors she believes could fundamentally transform how manufacturing is done at a global scale. "I think we can fundamentally transform the way manufacturing is done," she said, laying out her vision for the fund's next chapter.
Mia Panzer Steps Into a Newly Created COO Role
Working alongside Kato is Mia Panzer, who transitions from a business strategy role at a Toyota technology subsidiary into the newly formed COO position. She will oversee finance, operations, human resources, and legal strategy — the operational backbone that keeps a multi-hundred-million-dollar fund running without friction.
Panzer's history with Woven Capital's Managing Director Ro Gupta goes back to 2019, when he was building Carmera, a mapping technology company. She joined that startup three months into her first pregnancy to run finance — a decision that speaks to the kind of calculated boldness that has defined her trajectory. Before that, she had spent time at Goldman Sachs and then led finance at a pet wellness company before Gupta came calling.
When Toyota's tech arm acquired Carmera, both Gupta and Panzer moved into the Toyota organization. In December 2025, Gupta was appointed Managing Director of Woven Capital and decided to bring Panzer along. The COO role was essentially built around what she brings to the table.
She admits she initially questioned whether she was fully qualified. Then she reflected on how often women second-guess themselves in ways that men simply do not. "I always say to other women, 'Let them have low expectations,'" Panzer said. "Easy to overdeliver."
Her personal philosophy draws on the Japanese concept of ikigai — finding the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. For Panzer, who comes from a family with generations in automotive parts, this appointment feels like a full-circle moment.
What Woven Capital Does — and Why It Is Worth Watching
Woven Capital is not a traditional venture firm. It operates as Toyota's growth-stage investment arm, focused specifically on finding the next generation of mobility leaders — companies building in areas like autonomous driving, cybersecurity, space technology, and advanced manufacturing.
The firm launched its first $800 million fund in 2021 and announced an equally sized Fund II in August 2025. With Fund II, Woven Capital plans to back at least 20 new Series B investments, targeting startups that are not just compelling on paper but capable of becoming genuine collaboration partners for Toyota worldwide.
Its current portfolio includes Xona, a satellite company, and Machina Labs, a defense manufacturing infrastructure startup. These are not consumer apps — they are deep technology bets on physical systems that move, navigate, and manufacture things in the real world.
"We can co-lead, we can make small investments, or we can do an aggressive investment; we try to be flexible," Kato said, describing how the fund approaches deal structures. The goal, she explained, is to find the "future leader of mobility" — a company that Toyota can grow alongside, not just fund from a distance.
Women in Venture Capital: Progress Is Real, But the Gap Remains
The appointments of Kato and Panzer arrive at a moment when venture capital is still grappling honestly with its gender problem. Historical data showed that fewer than 20 percent of top corporate venture capital firms had women on their investing teams as recently as 2014, compared to just 7 percent of partners at the top 100 traditional venture firms at the same time.
By 2026, the number in traditional venture has climbed to roughly 15.4 percent — real progress, though still far from parity. Corporate venture capital firms have generally outpaced traditional VC when it comes to promoting women into leadership, but C-suite appointments like those at Woven Capital remain genuinely rare anywhere in the industry.
Having both a CIO and a COO position filled by women at the same corporate VC firm is a signal worth noting. It does not fix the broader industry imbalance overnight, but it does shift what people visualize when they picture who runs a billion-dollar mobility fund.
Panzer's own career is instructive here. She recalled a college recruiter who assumed she lacked technical knowledge because she was a woman. She remembered a peer at Goldman Sachs who told her directly that she was not his competition for a promotion — because she was a woman. She has spent a career proving those assumptions wrong, one deal at a time, with no fanfare required.
What This Leadership Shift Means for Mobility Startups
Kato and Panzer are stepping into their roles at a moment of genuine momentum. The fund is mid-deployment on a fresh $800 million raise, the mobility sector is accelerating fast, and Toyota's global ambitions in autonomous driving, space technology, and advanced manufacturing are only expanding.
Panzer's two core concerns as COO — a corporate slowdown that could stall deals and misalignment with Toyota as a parent company — are the exact friction points that have quietly derailed other corporate venture arms before. Her job is to build the systems that prevent those scenarios from ever coming up.
Kato, meanwhile, is building something designed to outlast any single investment cycle. She wants a portfolio that does not just generate returns on paper but creates tangible partnership value that flows back into Toyota's global operations.
For founders operating at the Series B stage in mobility, aeromobility, physical AI, or hardware, Woven Capital under this new leadership is worth studying closely. The fund has capital, a deeply connected parent company with global manufacturing reach, and now a leadership team that is openly determined to back companies others may overlook.
As Panzer put it, with the quiet confidence of someone who has consistently overperformed where no one expected it — let them have low expectations. Easy to overdeliver.
