Investor Profile: Delight Ventures — Thesis, Cheque Size & How to Apply

If you are raising capital and researching how to get funding from Delight Ventures, this profile is your starting point. Delight Ventures is a pre-foundation, seed, early stage investor focused on software, artificial intelligence, information technology, media and entertainment, sustainability, deep tech. Below: its thesis in its own terms, what it looks for, the companies it has backed, and the practical route founders use to get a pitch in front of the team.

Delight Ventures funding: the investment thesis

An independent venture capital firm founded in 2019 by DeNA's founding team, describing itself as 'by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs'. It aims to help startups and entrepreneurs emerge from Japan and go out into the world, putting entrepreneurs first with speedy decision-making and a culture that treats failure as valuable.

For founders, the practical read is simple: Delight Ventures is not a spray-and-pray shop. Its public positioning centres on software, artificial intelligence, information technology, media and entertainment, sustainability, deep tech at the pre-foundation, seed, early stage level, so a pitch lands only when your company sits squarely inside that mandate. Study the portfolio pattern below before you write the first email.

Cheque size and fund firepower

Delight Ventures has not publicly disclosed its fund size. What is public is the mandate: software, artificial intelligence, information technology, media and entertainment, sustainability, deep tech at the pre-foundation, seed, early stage stage. Treat the stage focus, not a corpus number, as your guide to the right ask.

Sectors and stages

The firm invests across software, artificial intelligence, information technology, media and entertainment, sustainability, deep tech, and its sweet spot is the pre-foundation, seed, early stage. If your startup sits outside those sectors, this is not your investor — a focused mandate cuts both ways. If you are inside it, you are speaking to a team that sees dozens of comparable companies a year and will benchmark you against them.

Notable portfolio companies

Companies associated with Delight Ventures in public sources include:

• Ocean
• OTOEARTH
• props
• Outerport
• soramed
• PrivacyTech
• Rentio
• MICOLY

Partners, programs and perks

People named in public sources: Dai Watanabe (Co-founder and Managing Partner), Tomoko Namba (DeNA founder, per firm vision), Takashi Tsujiguchi (Partner and CFO), Yusuke Nagano (Partner), Naoya Shibahara (Principal). Founder-to-partner fit matters — find the partner whose portfolio looks most like you.

Programs run by the firm: Venture Builder (DeNA Group fund; 28 startups produced as of August 2025), V-Challe (entrepreneur-nurturing program; 30 entrepreneurs emerged), DelightX (entrepreneur support program in the San Francisco Bay Area), Domain Expert Program (vertical-domain experts co-developing products with DeNA AI experts).

Credits and perks: Go-to-market support via DeNA's business network, DeNA as a customer, and AI service evaluation by DeNA's AI experts (DeNA Startup Boost Guides)

How to apply for funding

Delight Ventures has no publicly documented pitch route in the sources read for this profile. The default playbook applies: a warm introduction through a portfolio founder or a co-investor beats a cold email, and the contact details on the firm's official site are the legitimate front door.