On the jury at Startup Award Japan 2026: what a fund actually scores for

On May 15, 3P Ventures sat on the jury for Startup Award Japan 2026 — The Ventures' final pitch and award ceremony in Tokyo, and an official partner event of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, co-hosted with Futuround and Pulsar Innovations. Twelve judges from across the ecosystem — SBI Investment, Antler Japan, DG Daiwa Ventures, JETRO, Hitachi, CIC, and others — spent the day scoring early-stage teams. Being on the other side of the table is the fastest way to sharpen the rubric you use every other day of the year.

Judging forces you to name your rubric

When you're investing, judgment can stay tacit — a feeling you back with a check. When you're scoring a room of founders against Best Product, Best Traction, Best Team, and Best AI Solution, it can't. You have to say out loud why one team's traction is real and another's is a vanity chart, why one product is a wedge and another is a feature. That discipline is exactly what we carry back into our own diligence: people, process, and product, stated plainly rather than felt vaguely.

The bar this year

The field was genuinely early — pre-seed through Series A, every team with a working MVP and a claim on global impact. What separated the strongest wasn't the polish of the deck but the clarity of the problem and the evidence that customers actually feel it. The AI category was the clearest test: the teams worth remembering used models as a wedge into a specific, expensive problem, not AI for its own sake. That maps to how we read deep tech — the technology is the means; the P&L problem it closes is the point.

Why a room like this matters

Startup Award Japan connects finalists to a wide investor network — The Ventures cites a reach of 142 funds and angels — which is precisely the cross-border oxygen strong Japanese teams need. Put that alongside a jury drawn from both domestic and global funds, and you get high-signal exposure that compounds: founders get honest feedback on fundability, and investors get an early read on the next cohort before it's obvious to everyone else.

We came away with a short list of teams we want to keep talking to, and a familiar conviction: the most durable companies being built in and from Japan are led by founders who think globally from day one. Thanks to The Ventures and the co-hosts for the invitation to judge — and to the founders who put their work on the line in front of a room of investors. That's the hard part, and it's the part we're in this for.