COMPANY : : PEOPLE

CEO & Co-Founder, Tatsuya Kato

Kato Leads the business & company development by his abundant experience of startups and extensive network in Japanese IT industries as Chief Executive Officer for Midokura. Also he serves a function in raising capital and marketing.

He has proven track records and substantial experience in top management positions at Japanese public IT service and mobile internet companies, as well as VC fund management and investments in the internet and software sectors. Kato served as committee member of Japanese Government organizations and several starts up. He was a regular member and Director of the “Japan Association of Corporate Directors”, and was a vice chairman of the “Emerging Company Committee”. He is a director of Royal Gate Inc, Shift Inc., Millmo Inc., Movad Japan Co., Ltd. and boox inc, in Japan.

Prior to launching Midokura, Kato was an executive officer and in charge of new business development at CSK HOLDINGS CORPORATION, which is a top tier IT service company in Japan. He was also a Vice-President of it’s subsidiary company, CSK-IS, which is a research development and strategic investments company. Also, during the same period, he served as a CEO of it’s internet related subsidiary company, ISAO. Prior to CSK, he was formerly the CEO of Cybird, a JASDAQ listed and leading mobile internet and contents company. While serving as a co-founder and group COO of GLOBIS, Kato engaged in management of VC fund investments, he led successful IPOs of Work Applications, and GDH. Kato graduated from Kyoto University with a major in Engineering. He was also a player on the university's American football team, and contributed to the championship title twice.

CTO & Co-Founder, Dan Mihai Dumitriu

Dan serves as Chief Technology Officer for Midokura. In this role he focuses on the technical and challenges involved in designing, building, and operating the infrastructure of the organization. Prior to founding Midokura KK, Dan has served as Chief Architect at Ballista Securities LLC, a New York City ATS offering an electronic block trading system for options.

Previously, Dan has also served as Senior Researcher at NGI Group, Technical Lead at Amazon.com, Researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Senior Researcher at Sony Electronics, and Technical Lead at Reliable Network Solutions Inc. Dan holds a Master of Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts, both in Computer Science, from Cornell University. He is a co-author of numerous research papers, holds several patents in the field of distributed computing, and is an expert in cloud computing technology.

Kiyoshi Nishikawa, Director

After working at KDD Corporation（Currently known as KDDI Corporation), Kiyoshi Nishikawa next went to work at Arthur D. Little Inc. in the United States, where he became inspired to start his own company. After returning to Japan, he established a Japanese corporation of the world’s largest Internet company, America On Line, LLC. Later and based on this experience and the relationships he developed, he founded the first Internet business incubator, NETAGE, Inc. After serving as the President and CEO of NETAGE Group, he later became and still serves as the Chairman of ngi group, inc. Kiyoshi was one of the main entrepreneurs responsible for proposing and realization of “Shibuya Bit Valley Concept” and is well known for his various speeches and writings. He is a graduate of the Department of Education at Tokyo University.

Kobayashi Hirotaka, Company Auditor

Hirotaka Kobayashi is the managing director of GENEX Partners, the value up & turnaround professional firm. He worked for Microsoft as an international portfolio planner and has worked for Arthur.D.Little and Accenture. Tokyo University, BS. Carnegie Mellon University, Master of Science in Industrial Administration. Member of intellectual capital finance working group at Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation (METI)

Etsuko Kanetaka, Senior Manager

Etsuko specializes in startups. Prior to joining Midokura she was a Senior Consultant of sales at Bloomberg as well as part of the startup member group of the Lehman Brothers Fund Product Team in Japan where she was in charge of marketing mutual funds to domestic securities and banks. She started her career as a startup member of Ant Capital Partners, and was a manager of the Global Business Development team, Fund Management group, and the International Investment team. She is a graduate of the Department of Comparative Culture at Sophia University.

Adam Johnson, General Manager of US Development

Adam previously has experience in a variety of startups involving social and mobile applications development. He was previously a core developer of OpenSimulator, an open source virtual worlds platform. Adam has deep interests in high scalability, social applications, open source, and interoperability.

Adam has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and has worked in many environments, including Fortune 250 companies, politics, startups, and educational institutions. An evangelist of open source platforms, he constantly pushes for innovation and change in the industry.

Giuseppe (Pino) de Candia, Senior Developer

Before joining Midokura, Pino spent five years at Amazon.com. His first role there was software developer and technical lead for Dynamo, a nosql distributed object store. During his last two years at Amazon.com, Pino managed a team responsible for the maintenance and development of caching technologies that support the company’s distributed systems. Prior to Amazon.com, Pino was software developer at Endeca (in the area of structured search for enterprise applications), technical support engineer at ILOG (supporting users of visualization and business rules software libraries), and software developer at Reliable Network Solutions (building group communication libraries).

Pino earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in Computer Science at Cornell University. More recently he earned a Master of Science in Economics at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Pino has worked or studied in five countries (France, Italy, Spain, Tanzania, and USA) and speaks their major languages

Jacob Mandelson, Senior Developer

After graduating from the California Institute of Technology, Jacob worked on a real-time operating system kernel for Green Hills Software. From there, he went on to compiler toolchains, and then large-scale web advertising systems, spending six years working on Google AdSense before coming to Midokura.

Ryu Ishimoto, Senior Developer

Prior to joining Midokura, Ryu spent two years at Adlantis as a lead engineer and core developer in their data mining team building their high-traffic ad server system. He also spent four years developing Trading Systems for Bloomberg, Ltd., and four years as a .NET web developer and consultant for various major clients.

Ryu has a Master of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a board member of JOSUG(Japan OpenStack User Group).

Akane Matsuo, Senior Manager

Prior to joining Midokura, Akane spent 3 years at A.T. Kearney, a Chicago based management consulting firm where she engaged in various projects such as corporate strategies, overseas strategies and strategic sourcing. She also spent 5 years at NTT Communications, one of the biggest telcos in Japan, where she served as a network administrator and a product manager of global data network services.

Akane has degrees in Bachelor of Science from University of Tokyo and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), Sloan School of Business.

Masakazu KOYANAGI, Senior Manager, Corporate Development

Mr. KOYANAGI is a specialist of Entrepreneurial Business Development & Administration. Since 1999 he had been a corporate entrepreneur in telecommunication industry at ITOCHU Corporation, Tokyo, Japan. He led strategic and entrepreneurial business projects of ITOCHU's mobile handset distribution business, in particular, successfully spinning-off the business unit into ITC Networks Corporation, currently listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange 1st Section. Also, he played key role to develop product strategies and to administrate the operational company in order to enhance NTT Docomo's after-sales services in collaboration with 3 top non-life insurance groups in Japan as well as with Asurion Corporation, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, the leading company of micro-insurance and refurbishment businesses for electronics devices.

He has a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical Engineering) from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. He also holds an MBA from HEC School of Management, Paris, France.

Yoshi Tamura, Senior Developer

Prior to joining Midokura, Yoshi spent six years at NTT labs as a researcher, where he lead research and development of Kemari, a virtual machine synchronization mechanism for fault tolerance. He has also worked with various open source communities especially in virtualization.

Yoshi earned a Master of Science in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Sophia University. He is a member of the honor society of Phi Kappa Phi. He received the 2010 Yamashita SIG Research Award from IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan).

Tomoe Sugihara, Senior Developer

Tomoe Sugihara was a software engineer at NEC and cloud infrastructure expert at VA Linux Systems Japan before joining Midokura. In those roles, he worked on development of network storage devices for enterprise use, several cloud computing related software R&D projects including KVM, Eucalyptus, XCP, and Hadoop. While in NEC, he received a scholarship for a visiting scholar at Stanford University where he worked on the Trio project --- a research project of a new kind of database management system. He received a Master of Engineering in Advanced Course of System Engineering from Hiroshima University in 2002.