In Tokyo, Seeing Another Kind of Connection Among Innovators | Booming Hub @Japan Event Recap

On November 7, BlueRun Ventures successfully hosted Booming Hub Explorer Day in Tokyo. The event brought together key players from technology, industry, and capital, focusing on artificial intelligence, robotics, and future industrial applications to explore growth opportunities within the globalization wave. Multiple renowned Japanese institutions attended, including the five major trading houses (sogo shosha), top financial conglomerates and investment firms, and Fortune 500 Japanese enterprises.

Tokyo represents an important node in BlueRun's global ecosystem map. This event continued the firm's deep layout of global innovation hubs in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, and Singapore. Through its "Booming" entrepreneur ecosystem series, BlueRun organically integrates tech founders, market resources, and cross-border capital — building a global startup ecosystem event brand where energy from different ecosystems meets and interacts.

Jui Chan, Managing Partner at BlueRun Ventures, noted that AI is becoming a long-term productivity engine worldwide. From a comparative perspective, Japan's shortage of high-skilled labor alongside its industrial digitalization needs creates particularly favorable conditions for AI adoption locally, with applications concentrating on intelligent services and robotics manufacturing — making it a promising market for accelerating the commercialization of embodied intelligence and automation technologies. BlueRun Ventures closely follows the trend of tech globalization, continuing to identify and support internationally-minded Chinese innovative enterprises, connecting them with global patient capital and markets to achieve cross-border expansion of technology and market reach.

Cao Wei, Partner at BlueRun Ventures, shared insights on embodied intelligence and human-machine interaction. Embodied intelligence and robotics technology are rapidly moving from demonstration phases to real commercialization. As remote operation solutions and spatial computing technologies mature, robots can now perform high-frequency tasks such as sorting, customer guidance, restocking, and inspection — gradually achieving scaled deployment across industries. Going forward, robot form factors will diversify further, evolving from embodied intelligence foundations toward general-purpose scenarios and accelerating industrial adoption.

At this event, multiple outstanding portfolio companies from the BlueRun family also joined on-site to introduce their core products and project progress to attendees. VITURE showcased its achievements in product technology, design, and real-world application scenarios, demonstrating broad applicability across diverse use cases, along with its localization results and rapid growth in the Japanese market. Youibot, centered on mobile manipulation robots, drives intelligent logistics and scaled deployment of inspection operations in critical industries such as semiconductors and energy through its autonomous highly-generalizable embodied intelligence model and "one brain, multiple forms" solution. Wisson Robotics focuses on embodied intelligence technology innovation centered on "plastic muscles," promoting scaled deployment of robots in high-risk and complex scenarios through its low-cost, high-safety, and highly-adaptable soft robotics platform. Galbot provides full-stack embodied intelligent robot technology services for diverse scenarios including retail, healthcare, and industrial applications, sharing its latest progress from general manipulation capabilities to real commercial deployment. Genspark, through vivid testimonials from local Japanese power users, demonstrated its one-stop AI Agent workspace, using unified data flows to connect multiple application scenarios, enabling enterprises to achieve intelligent collaboration and content production efficiency gains through a single entry point.

Swipe to view more. To provide more practical and comprehensive local market insights for enterprises expanding overseas, BlueRun invited Masaki Ichimura, attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, who provided perspectives on establishing robust legal structures for cross-border operations from the vantage point of Japan's legal environment.

During the roundtable on global tech trends and investment opportunities, Jui Chan, Managing Partner at BlueRun Ventures, Stephen O'Neill, Cofounder and Managing Director at 57 Stars, Hatta Takeshi, Principal at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank's Corporate Planning Department and Chief Strategic Officer for China Business, and Jing Kun, Founder and CEO of Genspark, discussed key questions including the evolution of global tech dynamics among China, the US, and Japan; scaling paths for cross-border tech companies; shifts in capital and market access; and competitive moats in AI commercialization.

The second roundtable focused on tech talent and industrial ecosystems. Liu Ji, Partner at BlueRun Ventures, Jin Jinghao, Deputy Director of External Business at JETRO Beijing, Whiplus Wang, Head of IVS Global, and Yan Zhun, Head of China Business at Deloitte Ventures Japan, exchanged views on the attractiveness of Japan's tech ecosystem, strategies for building international teams in Japan, success factors for startups entering the Japanese market, and funding and partnership ecosystems.

BlueRun looks forward to taking this Tokyo event as a new starting point, connecting global tech founders and ecosystem partners to jointly identify new trends and opportunities amid technological transformation, enabling more entrepreneurial forces to find new resonance on global coordinates. Going forward, BlueRun will continue building cross-regional, cross-cultural innovation exchange platforms, linking more frontier technologies with industrial needs, and supporting internationally promising entrepreneurial forces with an ever more open vision — accompanying the next generation of Chinese tech enterprises onto the broad world stage.

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