Ken Asada leads Salesforce Ventures' Japan and Korea investments, bringing a background as a systems engineer, strategy consultant, and investor at IBM Japan, Intel Capital, and NTT DoCoMo Ventures, and he focuses on industrial infrastructure like manufacturing data, supply-chain visibility, and AI built around Japanese business workflows. He tends to back companies aiming to become the standard in their field, such as Kotoba for East Asian speech recognition and Resilire for supply-chain risk management, and he runs Salesforce Ventures more like a traditional VC that can lead funding rounds, which is unusual for a corporate-backed investor in Japan.