SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026: Ready to Push Startups Past Pitches

Marquee startup conference, SusHi Tech Tokyo, is turning into something closer to a citywide festival. AI, robotics, resilience, and entertainment are the four themes Tokyo says are most likely to reshape cities. It is tackling them by building a startup environment that helps companies move from ideas to real-world use.

Moreover, new hubs and labs in places like Shibuya and Takanawa show the ecosystem is not just talk.

That ecosystem sits at the heart of SusHi Tech Tokyo's program. Kazunori Maebayashi, a director at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Startup Strategy Promotion Headquarters, points to plans for real robots and stage demonstrations outside the exhibition hall. There will even be autonomous driving displays around the venue.

At Tokyo Innovation Base (TIB) on February 15, Tokyo officials said SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 is targeting more than 700 startup exhibitors, around 10,000 business meetings, and roughly 60,000 participants at Tokyo Big Sight from July 27-29. Now in its fourth year, Maebashi said, "In terms of scale and content, we are making this the most evolved version yet."

*Kazunori Maebayashi (©Tokyo Metropolitan Government)*

Not Just a Showcase

The pitch contest at the heart of SusHi Tech is also expanding. This year's SusHi Tech Challenge drew 820 applications from 60 countries and regions, with 20 selected for a semifinal round at the venue.

Tokyo's larger goal, however, is t to use the big annual event as the front door to a longer-term startup and scale-up strategy. In 2022, the city set what it calls a 10×10×10 target, aiming to expand startup numbers, public-private collaboration, and global reach tenfold by 2027.

A Bet on Long-Haul Autonomy

Tokyo now has the hubs to carry that momentum beyond the venue and into the city. The most visible is Tokyo Innovation Base, or TIB.

TIB's management frames its mission in practical terms: helping startups land real business. "We're a public facility, but we're not here to just host events," Tomonobu Nishigawa, a TIB official, said during a media tour of the facility. "We're here to connect startups to people who can actually do business with you."

One case study is T2, a company working on autonomous long-haul trucking.

During the tour, a T2 engineer described trucking as "a problem Japan can't solve with incremental fixes." The sector is facing a severe labor crunch, and long-distance routes are particularly hard to staff. T2's approach is to run autonomous trucks on highways, while using humans for the first and last miles, an operational compromise designed to fit real-world constraints.

He said the project has already moved beyond closed-course trials. T2 is running paid commercial operations at Level 2, using the Shin-Tomei Expressway between Tokyo and Nagoya as a proving ground to build real-world driving data.

The company has also completed long-distance runs, including a Tokyo–Kobe route of about 550 kilometers, as part of its effort to turn autonomy into something logistics operators can use on real routes.

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Memory Stickers

And a few steps down the hall at TIB, startups are pitching a different kind of value — joy and play — like an NFC sticker that brings a short video back to life with a tap.

Yomiyomi, a student startup, is selling a product it calls the "Memory-Summoning Sticker." Tap it with a smartphone, and you can store a 15-second video and a message, then bring it back "in one second" with another tap.

Representative Reina Nakamura pitched it as "putting memories into objects"—sticking it on a mother-and-child health handbook, for example, or on the display stand for a kid's first homerun baseball. The consumer version is priced at three stickers for ¥1,000 JPY ($6 USD), while a customizable business batch starts at 100 stickers for ¥25,000 ($160).

Nakamura said it's already being used as artist merchandise, including fan club limited drops where the content changes. "We're even exploring a project with (construction firm) Shimizu Corporation to embed the stickers into building materials," she added.

Real Estate as Ecosystem Builder

If TIB is Tokyo's central node, SAKURA DEEPTECH SHIBUYA is meant to be an on-the-ground proof point.

At the start of a press tour of the hub, participants were introduced to TECH-Tokyo, which Executive Director Jorge Cortell described as a membership-based matching platform built around corporate needs. "I founded TECH-Tokyo with a very specific objective in mind," he said. The aim, he added, is to "select the best research and executive education programs and startups for Japanese corporations." They're working with universities, including "Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge," he added, and then doing the matching based on members' challenges.

*A slide from the SAKURA DEEPTECH SHIBUYA presentation (©JAPAN Forward)*

He argued that "the number one thing that startups need is corporate partnerships," so TECH-Tokyo "put[s] the corporations at the center."

SAKURA DEEPTECH SHIBUYA is Tokyu Land Corporation's Shibuya-based deeptech hub and co-innovation program. Designed to match global startups with Japanese companies, it pushes those relationships toward pilot projects and proof-of-concept projects.

A Tokyu Land Corporation representative framed the company as more than a real estate developer. The goal, she said, is to act as an ecosystem builder, creating programs and partnerships that keep startups in Shibuya long enough to grow. Tokyu Land Corporation has mapped a 2.5-kilometer "Greater Shibuya" area around the station, positioning the hub as part of a longer pipeline rather than a single building.

A New Deeptech Hub

So, why does Sakura Deeptech belong in Shibuya?

"We're trying to build a global innovation hub focused on deeptech," said Ken Varhama, program manager at Scrum Ventures, a collaborating company. He argued that Shibuya has been a tech cluster before. It was known as "Bit Valley" in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, it hosts global IT players such as Google, with academia and public-sector initiatives nearby.

Varhama said the program is designed for fast corporate collaboration, bringing global startups into structured contact with Japanese companies and driving projects forward.

He highlighted a concrete example: Verobotics, an Israeli startup, is working with Tokyu Land Corporation on an automated building-cleaning robot. This robot cleans high-rise building windows and facades without human operators on ropes or scaffolding. It can also scan the surface as they work, helping owners spot issues while keeping the building clean.

He also pointed to a collaboration involving Kai, the Japanese knife maker, and an MIT-origin technology called Foundation Alloy. Kai's traditional process is mold-dependent, Kai explains. Its knives are made using a mold and then taken out of the mold, the majority of which is then disposed of. He argued the MIT technology could produce knives without molds, cutting out a tooling-heavy step and making iteration easier.

Startup Laboratories

Once the introductions are made, startups still need somewhere to build. That's where LiSH comes in ー railway company JR East's startup facility at Takanawa Gateway. It's a lab-equipped workspace designed for science-heavy startups. In addition, it provides a practical base for startups to partner with Japanese companies. LiSH opened in May 2025 and has about 150 companies overall, roughly 70 of which are startups.

The lab itself is set up as a general workspace with smaller side rooms for more specialized work. There is a microbiology area, plus labs focused on plant physiology and aquatic ecology.

Access to lab space depends on a company's contract tier. Some use the shared central lab, while others have their own rooms, so teams can scale from hot-desk research to dedicated lab and desk space without leaving the building.

*A slide from the LiSH presentation (©JAPAN Forward)*

"You just got off the train — it's a two-minute walk to get here," a LiSH representative said on a tour of the onsite lab. The point, he added, is that this kind of facility would normally sit "inside a campus of a university," not next to a major transportation hub. Startups can use it for a fixed amount per month, with all the lab equipment owned by JR East.

Mushroom-Based Materials

The tour's most memorable moments came from the startups themselves. "Mushrooms can save the world," Ronald Diaz, co-founder and chief business development officer of MYCL declared. He led with what he was wearing. "As you can see, I wear mushroom shoes, mushroom bags, and also my laptop case is covered," he said.

He described MYCL's origin story in an agricultural reality, biomass waste being burned. His company bet that there was room for a truly bio-based alternative to sustainable materials like synthetic leather, which he described as "still plastic."

MYCL's pitch went beyond mushroom leather into performance-grade materials. One prototype panel, he said, weighs 1.5 kilograms but can withstand 1.5 tons of load. It also has "really good fire properties" and strong thermal and acoustic insulation.

In Japan, he said, the material is branded Kinori and is already being used commercially. He added that the company has spoken with brands including Adidas and a UK shoe company. MYCL is also currently fundraising to expand capacity.

Personalized Gut Health

The next company's pitch brought the tour from materials into biotech. Metagen's pitch was personalized gut-health biotech. It analyzes a person's gut microbiome, the bacteria living in the intestines. Using those results, it recommends diet and health interventions tailored to the individual, rather than a one-size-fits-all supplement.

In its LiSH presentation, a Metagen speaker called human fecal samples "brown gems" because of the information they contain, stressing that customers can't just buy the company's products off the shelf. "You have to send your faeces to the analysis center," he said. "After three to six weeks, we determine your gut type," and the customer can then choose a recommended food plan.

Metagen said it has already launched gut environment-based products with Calbee, a major Japanese food company best known for snack brands such as potato chips. Metagen framed its long-term ambition as "realizing zero disease" by making "gut environment-based healthcare" a new standard.

Building the Pipeline

*ITAMAE planning member Yurina Yamada (©Tokyo Metropolitan Government)*

Tokyo's pitch is that SusHi Tech helps turn introductions into a pipeline, bringing founders, corporates, researchers, and investors into the same orbit.

Tokyo Vice Governor Manabu Miyasaka framed the city's role as picking winners rather than clearing the path. "Our job," he said, is to "build the bridge so startups can connect to the right partners and markets without wasting time on detours."

That theme showed up on the student side, too. ITAMAE, the student planning team that helps design parts of SusHi Tech, framed its role as being the connective tissue. "The future doesn't build itself," said Yurina Yamada, an ITAMAE planning member. It won't be built by government or big companies alone, she argued, but by "the people who connect them."

Author: Daniel Manning