Venture Café Tokyo Hosts ROCKET PITCH NIGHT TOKYO: Bloom 2026, Bringing Together Around 45 Pitch Teams and Over 500 Participants

Venture Café Tokyo, a global ecosystem activator operating in 16 cities worldwide and offering various programs to accelerate innovation, held “ROCKET PITCH NIGHT TOKYO: Bloom 2026” on Thursday, April 23, 2026. The event reserved the entire fourth-floor area of Toranomon Hills Forum, bringing together around 45 pitching teams and more than 500 participants, and creating extensive interaction between challengers and supporters. ROCKET PITCH NIGHT is a large-scale pitch event organized by Venture Café Tokyo. To date, it has welcomed more than 900 entrepreneur teams and over 10,000 audience members. Past participants have used their pitches as a springboard to raise more than 10 billion yen in total funding, gain acceptance into global acceleration programs, pursue joint product development, and generate many other encounters and concrete outcomes. The event featured two types of awards: the People's Choice Award and the KPMG Award. The People's Choice Award was selected through audience voting in each category. The KPMG Award, provided by KPMG AZSA LLC, grants recipients the right to participate in a pitch event that selects Japan’s representative for a global competition. The category winners were as follows. People's Choice Award: Social, Education, Agriculture & Food: #9 tekaro; Enterprise, Operations, Productivity & Security: #16 Nailoo; IT / AI / IoT / AR & VR: #30 TAIZAN Inc.; Environment, Energy, Medical, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Air & Space: #31 UPCYCLE Technologies Inc.; U-18 Pitch: U-5 AfterGlow. KPMG Award: Category 1 & 2: #2 SATSOIL Inc.; Category 3 & 4: #31 UPCYCLE Technologies Inc. Despite approaching rain, the event recorded more than 530 on-site participants and was a major success. Overall NPS among participants and speakers reached 46.4, indicating high satisfaction with the event. Participant demographics included 25.3% startup-related attendees, 24.2% corporate employees, 16.7% students, and 11.2% investors, along with participants from a wide range of backgrounds such as students and public officials. The event once again helped expand the circle of innovation. The organizers hope that the pitches, networking, and other interactions served as a catalyst for further innovation. Ryusuke Komura, Head of Venture Café Japan, commented that ROCKET PITCH NIGHT TOKYO: Bloom 2026 concluded successfully and expressed sincere gratitude to attendees, speakers, partners, operators, and everyone involved. This edition intentionally narrowed its scale, with 45 pitching teams and around 500 participants, and focused on the on-site experience without online streaming. It was a night that returned to Venture Café Tokyo’s mission, “Connecting Innovators To Make Things Happen,” and challenged the team to improve the quality of each encounter and dialogue. Komura noted that beyond the energy of the pitches, the dense conversations and serendipitous encounters throughout the venue revealed many signs of concrete co-creation. True to the concept of “Bloom,” each challenge began to sprout in this setting and take root as a tangible connection. For entrepreneurs and challengers, truly valuable opportunities lie in who they meet and how they build relationships. The concentrated nature of this event created the kind of chemistry that leads to next actions. Venture Café Tokyo will continue to focus on the quality of encounters and create spaces where challengers connect with one another and accelerate co-creation, looking forward to seeing the many possibilities that emerged this time grow and bloom. Venture Café Tokyo is a community with the mission of “Connecting Innovators To Make Things Happen,” bringing together entrepreneurs, investors, and other diverse innovators to generate innovation for society. As the first Asian hub of Venture Café, a sister organization of CIC founded in Boston in 2010, it began activities in Japan in March 2018. Under the leadership of Associate Professor Yasuhiro Yamakawa of Babson College in Boston and Ryusuke Komura, representative director and fellow Babson alumnus, Venture Café Tokyo runs Japan’s largest innovation acceleration and networking programs in Tokyo, Tsukuba, Nagoya, Gifu, Ritsumeikan University’s Osaka Ibaraki Campus, and Fukuoka.