(born March 28, 1962) is a Japanese businessman, educator, and venture capitalist. He is the founder and president of Globis Corporation and Globis University Graduate School of Management. He is also founder and managing partner of Globis Capital Partners, president of the G1 Institute and the Kibow Foundation, and owner of the Ibaraki Robots basketball team and radio broadcaster Ibaraki Broadcasting System.
Early life
Yoshito Hori was born in Niihama, Ehime Prefecture on March 28, 1962. Hori spent most of his early youth at Tōkai, Ibaraki where his father worked as a nuclear researcher. At age 3 he moved to New York in the United States with his family. About 2 years later his family moved to Michigan. Hori moved back to Japan during the second grade of elementary school. Around the end of sixth grade his family relocated to Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture.
Hori attended in his hometown of Mito, which he graduated in 1981. After high school he entered Kyoto University where he completed a BSc in Engineering in 1986.
Hori started his career at Sumitomo Corporation in 1986 where he was in charge of new business development and foreign trade of production-plant facilities. He was able to secure sponsorship from his employer in 1989 to study at Harvard Business School. While studying at Harvard Business School, Hori was highly influenced by his classmates in deciding to pursue entrepreneurship. He observed how the US provided a fertile business environment for start-ups. Hori set out to replicate a similar environment in Japan by creating an ecosystem of knowledge, people and capital. Hori obtained his MBA in 1991. He left Sumitomo in 1992 to start his own business.
Globis Group
Globis Corporation
Hori established Globis Corporation in Japan on August 1, 1992 with 800,000 yen (about $7,500 USD) in capital. He first approached his alma mater about opening a Harvard Business School franchise in Japan but was turned down. A licensing agreement was made, however, allowing Harvard case studies to be used. Hori started teaching a single marketing course based on the case study method from a small rented classroom in Shibuya, Tokyo. Additional business subjects such as finance were subsequently introduced. This started Globis Management School (GMS), the company’s business education department.
By 1993 Globis Management School had expanded to three campus locations in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. A joint MBA program with the University of Leicester was launched in 1996, later discontinued in January 2008. In 2003 the Graduate Diploma in Business Administration (GDBA) was launched, a non-degree program and predecessor to the later MBA degree offered after the establishment of Graduate School of Management, Globis University. GDBA was discontinued in 2013.
Globis expanded into several new business areas following Globis Management School. In 1993 a corporate training service was launched. In 1995 Globis’s first MBA book series was published. Executive training programs were added in 2005. In 2016 the online learning service GLOBIS Manabihodai was launched. The company introduced a LMS platform in 2018. By 2022, Globis had 691 employees, offices in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Fukuoka, and Yokohama, and overseas subsidiaries in China, Singapore, Thailand, the United States and Belgium.
Globis Capital Partners
In 1996 Hori founded Globis Capital Partners (GCP) as a hands-on VC firm to support various startup portfolio companies. That same year an initial $5 million venture fund was raised, with $1 million coming from Sega Enterprises’ chairman Isao Okawa. In 1999 the Apax Globis Japan Fund worth $187 million was jointly raised with Apax Partners. Five additional funds were raised in 2006, 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022. Global Capital Partners reported it reached a cumulative fund size of over ¥160 billion JPY (approximately $1.2 billion) invested in over 190 Japanese companies in 2022. Notable portfolio companies that went public include e-commerce platform Mercari, internet media company GREE, and news aggregator app SmartNews. Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) disclosed in 2022 that it would invest in Globis Capital Partners’ latest VC fund, a first in Japan.