Tomo Shibata

Founder & Managing Director at Hi-node advisory Sàrl

Speaker

Tomo is the Founder and Managing Director of Hi-node Advisory Sàrl, a climate-tech strategy advisory built around a single idea: Building globally with Japan.

The name carries both halves of that idea. Hinode (日の出) is the Japanese word for sunrise; a node is a point of connection in a wider network. Hi-node was founded on the principle that Japan is best understood not as a destination market to be entered, but as a node in a global system — one with the industrial depth, capital patience and engineering rigour to take frontier technology from first-of-a-kind to scale, and to send it back out into world markets improved.

Hi-node advises founders, investors and corporates on the strategy and partnership architecture that makes those connections work: go-to-market and Japan entry strategy for Western deep-tech companies, corporate partnership and CVC design for Japanese industrials, investment diligence, and accelerator programme design.

The firm's focus sits where Japan's opportunity is sharpest: the energy transition (grid flexibility, storage and aggregation, geothermal, carbon management), the energy and infrastructure demands of the AI build-out, and resilience and adaptation.

Previously, Tomo was a founding Partner at Japan Energy Capital, where he built a portfolio of transformative climate technologies across North America and Europe, including Svante (industrial carbon capture), Energy Dome (CO₂ long-duration storage), GHGSat (satellite methane monitoring) and Eavor (closed-loop geothermal). Before that, he spent his career at Bain & Company in Tokyo and Zurich, advising on corporate strategy, large-scale transformation and private equity and corporate M&A diligence.

Swiss-born and trilingual in English, French and Japanese, Tomo splits his time between Geneva and Tokyo.