A Year of Partnership and Growth
As the year comes to a close, I want to thank the many people who made 2025 another meaningful year for Japan Cloud.
This was a year defined by growth across all our portfolio companies and by relationships that deepened over time, leaders who showed up repeatedly, and teams who invested in building long-term capability. To our portfolio companies, their customers, our ecosystem partners, and the Japan Cloud team: thank you! Your commitment, patience, and openness made this possible.
To Our Portfolio Companies
To the global cloud companies building in Japan with us, thank you for your trust and long-term perspective.
Entering Japan is rarely straightforward. It demands intention, humility, and a willingness to build real, scalable organizations rather than quick market extensions. Over the past year, we worked alongside our portfolio companies as they invested in leadership hiring, customer engagement, governance, and people development.
That commitment translated into impactful wins and go-lives with some of Japan’s most respected enterprises, including Aeon, ANA, Honda, Isuzu, JAL, JR East and West, Mitsubishi Electric, and Omron, among others.
Collectively, the teams on the ground grew by 30 percent—now surpassing 400 employees—underscoring a shared commitment to building durable organizations rooted in Japan.
We also welcomed real-time data analytics company ClickHouse to the Japan Cloud ecosystem. ClickHouse made the strategic decision to establish a durable presence in Japan, anchored in empowered local leadership and strong alignment with their global strategy. This approach has resonated with their Japanese customers and reflects a shared belief that growth in Japan must be built to last.
To Our Customers and Enterprise Leaders
We are grateful to the more than 265 CxOs and senior enterprise executives from industry leaders including Fujitsu, Mercari, Mitsubishi Materials, and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) who participated in our CxO Program, engaging in one-to-one dialogues, executive roundtables, conferences, interviews, and curated community gatherings.
These were not transactional interactions. Many leaders returned across multiple engagements, allowing relationships to deepen and conversations to advance well beyond initial introductions into the sales cycle.
Our substantive dialogue with customers on cloud adoption, AI governance, DevOps, and operational resilience across manufacturing, finance, technology, logistics, consumer goods, and digital services continue to shape our understanding of what sustainable growth looks like in Japan.
To Those Building the Next Generation of Leaders
This year, we invested deeply in building people in our ecosystem.
Across 2025, Japan Cloud supported more than 50 structured talent and leadership initiatives, reaching hundreds of practitioners across our portfolio and ecosystem. These efforts spanned onboarding, management and leadership development, functional training, and role-based communities.
We ran talent development initiatives such as the Emerging Leader Development Program (ELDP) and High-Potential Leadership Program (HPLP) across multiple sessions, encouraging participants to return as their responsibilities evolved. In parallel, we convened ongoing communities for revenue leaders, talent teams, operations leaders, engineers, and marketers.
These initiatives formed a sustained cadence, building shared context around hiring, onboarding, go-to-market execution, governance, and organizational design in a Japanese enterprise environment.
To the Japan Cloud Team and Ecosystem
This work would not be possible without the people behind it.
To the Japan Cloud team, advisors, program leads, and ecosystem partners who planned, facilitated, and sustained these efforts throughout the year: thank you. Your care for quality and follow-through is what turns intention into reality.
What we are building together is not a calendar of activities, but a foundation for long-term collaboration between global cloud companies and Japanese enterprises. That foundation is strengthened through repetition, responsibility, and mutual respect.
Looking Ahead
As we move into the year ahead, I remain grateful and optimistic. Conversations are becoming more thoughtful, relationships deeper, and the shared understanding that building lasting companies in Japan requires patience and partnership continues to grow.
Thank you for being part of the Japan Cloud community. We look forward to continuing this work together.
Warm regards,
Aruna
