
Innovation Day 2022
In collaboration with Nissay Asset Management Corp. & Nippon Life Insurance Company
Date and time
15 December 2022
8 AM – 8 PM
Speakers

Alex Bangash
Co-founder, Transpose Platform

Bruno Bowman
General Partner, Grep VC

Eli Broverman
Founder, Betterment

Ernest Semerda
Problem Solver, Veryfi

Garry Tan
CEO, Y Combinator

Hideya Sadanaga
Head of Private Equity Investment Department. Senior Managing Director, Japan Post Bank

Hiroshi Ozeki
President and CEO, Nissay Asset Management

James Riney
Founding Partner and CEO, Coral Capital

Jeff Cruttenden
Founder, Acorn and Say

Kai Stinchcombe
Co-founder and CEO, Truelink

Kaoru Onishi
Head of Foreign Equity & Alternative Investment Dept., Nissay Asset Management

Prabhu Palani
CIO, City of San Jose Retirement System

Pushkar Mukewar
Co-founder and CEO, Drip Capital

Shashank P.S
CEO, CasaOne

Ted Yamamoto
General Partner, WASEDA University Ventures (WUV)

Trang Nguyen
Co-founder, Transpose Platform
Attendees
Trang Nguyen co-founded Transpose Management in 2015. Trang was also a former operator and executive member of Trusted Insight, where she worked closely with engineers, ran products and pricing (such as launching the Institutional LP Ranking List, Institutional Forum, Global Institutional Summit & Events, and LP/GP Job Board), developed the very first partnerships for TI with Fortune 500 corporations with a focus on Japan and the US, and grew an institutional LP community for the platform. Trang launched multiple LP products and features on Trusted Insight to increase user engagement and scale the LP network on the platform to over 35,000+ LP members. Prior to Transpose Platform, Trang assisted in spearheading the investment initiatives and managing portfolios of both endowment and corporate money for Sutter Health. With a total AUM of $9 billion, she helped Sutter Health with asset allocation and manager selection for public and private markets. She also traded and helped run a $1B credit portfolio, including structured products and corporates. Earlier in her career, she held various finance and marketing roles at Visa, Bank of New York Mellon, and startups.
Alex is the managing director of Transpose Platform, an anchor fund for the most disruptive venture funds of this decade. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Trusted Insight, a machine learning–driven platform that hosts the world’s largest network of institutional investors. Prior to TI Platform, Alex managed capital for clients at premier endowments, foundations, family offices, insurance firms, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds since 2003.
He has helped invest over $2 billion in 50 funds with a track record of investing over $1 billion in 50+ funds for institutional investors with an IRR of 30%+ and 2x NAV. He advised the first checks in Accel, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, Emergence, Y Combinator, Khosla, SaaStr, Initialized, Crystal Towers, and Baseline. Earlier in his career, Alex was an engineer and executive at AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs, and GE. Alex holds an MBA from the Wharton School (where he is a frequent guest lecturer); an M.Eng in Operation Research from Cornell; and a BS in Computer Science, English and Economics from Cornell.
Eli Broverman is Co-Founder of Treasury. Treasury is a global platform created by the founders of Betterment, Acorns, and Rise to support the most ambitious ideas in financial technology. Eli has been at the forefront of the FinTech boom as a founder, investor, and adviser. He is co-founder of Betterment, the world’s first robo-adviser, that has scale to over $20b in AUM and 500k customers. He is a regular guest on CNBC, FOX, and Bloomberg TV, and tech industry events.
Prabhu is a veteran of the investment industry who brings over 23 years of investment experience with global investment leaders, including Barclays Global Investors, Franklin Templeton Investments, and Mellon Capital Management. He was Managing Director and Senior Investment Strategist at Mellon Capital Management, where he helped build the firm’s quantitative equity capabilities. Previously, he was an SVP and Portfolio Manager at Franklin Templeton Investment managing structured equity portfolios. He has also held fixed income portfolio management positions at BGI and NetWest Bank. He is also a former Trustee of the Federated City Employees Retirement System where he served on the Investment Committee for 6 months. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose and a volunteer with the City of Fremont Police Department.
Jeff Cruttenden is a currently a Co-Founder and General Partner at Treasury. He is also the Co-Founder of Acorns, leading financial wellness system with over 5M users, and SAY, a technology platform for open communication between companies and their owners by connecting shareholders to each other and empowering them to access their full ownership rights
Heads Japan Post Bank’s $30B private equity investment program and has been responsible for all aspects of its creation and construction. Prior to joining Japan Post Bank in January 2016, worked at Nippon Life Insurance Company, where he established and lead Nippon Life’s private equity operations in the US, and was also Head of Product Development at Nissay Asset Management Co. the asset management subsidiary of Nippon Life.
He has a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Tokyo, LL.M. from the University of Michigan Law School, has passed the New York Bar Exam and also is a Chartered Member of the Security Analysts Association of Japan.
Pushkar Mukewar is the CEO of Drip Capital. In his 13-years-long career, he has worked across various geographies and has an in-depth understanding of the global financial services industry. Pushkar realized the huge potential of addressing the working capital gap for small businesses in emerging economies which became his inspiration behind starting Drip in 2016. Drip offers a unique trade financing product targeted toward small businesses engaged in cross-border trade by making the underwriting and financing of international B2B transactions seamless.
In the past, Pushkar was a venture capitalist at Saama Capital and was involved with several high-growth start-ups in India, including Paytm, Snapdeal, and Bluestone. He has also been a Consultant with Oliver Wyman in the US, UAE, and Switzerland, where he advised several financial services clients on strategic and operational issues. He started his career at Capital One where he developed credit risk analytics for the subprime consumer loans business.
Pushkar holds an MBA degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an MS degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Pushkar is also a thought leader and influencer in the global trade finance ecosystem. His opinions are routinely published in leading publications like Forbes, Fortune, and Financial Express, to name a few. He has also won numerous awards, including BW 40 under 40.
An “Aussie in Silicon Valley”, Ernest brings two decades of entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership to Veryfi, a YCombinator-backed company. Veryfi provides AI-driven Intelligent Document Processing with Day 1 Accuracy™ to instantly capture, extract and transform unstructured documents into structured data.Prior to Veryfi, Ernest was co-founder of Medlert, a platform to connect hospitals to ambulances in the U.S. Before Medlert, Ernest led International Engineering at Coupons, Inc., where he experienced the journey from startup to IPO. Ernest joined Coupons through acquisition, after co-founding and growing Couponstar.
Ernest holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and an M.B.A.
Shashank is the co-founder and CEO of CasaOne. Previously, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel. Prior to that, he was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners with a focus on internet marketplaces and SaaS. He previously founded Shopmonk, a cross-border ecommerce company in South East Asia and Atticous, a marketing automation company. He started his career at SAP where he led the development of SAP’s cloud retail product for emerging markets.
Garry is a designer/engineer turned early-stage investor. He was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years, advising and funding over 600 companies and more than a thousand founders. He co-founded the YC-backed blog platform Posterous (Top 200 Quantcast site, acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that, he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir’s financial analysis product, and also designed Palantir’s logo. He has a BS in Computer Systems
Engineering from Stanford.
Hiroshi OZEKI is the President and Chief Executive Officer at Nissay Asset Management Corporation.He joined Nippon Life Insurance Company after graduation from the University of Tokyo in 1987 and has held various roles in loan portfolio management, risk management, corporate strategies, hybrid capital finance, investor relations, ALM, and Asset Allocation of the Life Insurance General Account. Most recently, he has held an executive management role in New York as Regional CEO for the Americas and Europe of Nippon Life.Mr. OZEKI obtained a B.A. in Physics from the University of Tokyo and an A.M.P. from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Chartered Member of the Security Analysts Association of Japan and a Member of The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence.
Bruno spent seven years at Google leading the engineering teams on Enterprise Gmail ($1 billion annual revenue), and created Google Earth (startup to 1 billion installs). He is an Equity Partner at Data Collective Venture Capital as well as a personal angel investor in 28 startups with 73% IRR for exits thus far. He earned a computer science degree from Cambridge University with double first-class honors.
http://www.brunobowden.com
She is General Manager and Head of Foreign Equity & Alternative Investment Department of Nissay Asset Management since April, 2022. She is responsible for a wide range of alternative investment for Nippon Life. She started her career with Nippon life since 1996, and she has been responsible for alternative fields including ramping up Nippon Life’s global private equity fund investment program since 2003.
Prior to her current role, she led the manager selection including private equity and infrastructure investment both for Nippon Life and third party clients. In most recent role, she has focused on introducing and starting impact investment programs.