Susumu "Shin" Kodera

Shin is Co-Managing Partner at E12 and Senior Vice President, Corporate Development at Mitsui & Co. (U.S.A.). He brings three decades of hands-on operating and investing experience, spanning venture and growth investing, buyouts and cross-border M&A across the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Before joining E12, Shin was a General Manager at Mitsui & Co., Ltd., where he led the Venture Capital Department within the Private Equity Division and later ran the Sugar & Fermented Products Division, giving him a rare combination of investment leadership and P&L ownership of a global operating business.

His career with Mitsui started in 1995, and by 1998 he was heading the firm's St. Petersburg office, covering Russia from St. Petersburg and Moscow. He moved into principal investment in 2006, then spent two years in Plymouth, Michigan as Director of Corporate Development at Metaldyne Corporation, working inside a portfolio company through one of the most demanding periods in the automotive sector. From 2009 he built Mitsui's venture franchise in Silicon Valley as Investment Director and later Managing Director of Mitsui Global Investment in Menlo Park, with an interim posting as General Manager in Tokyo, before returning to Tokyo in 2018 to lead venture capital firm-wide. Across his career he has accumulated roughly ten years in venture capital, five in buyouts and seven in corporate M&A.

Shin holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Yokohama City University. He has lived and invested on three continents and works in both Japanese and English.

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