Yohei Nakajima is an innovator, artist, and venture capitalist. He is the general partner at Untapped Capital, and early stage venture capital firm. Nakajima has been supporting early-stage startups for 15 years working closely with early-stage startups, and with global corporations such as The Walt Disney Company and Nintendo through his career at Techstars and Scrum Ventures. He is widely recognized for his unique “build-in-public” approach, where he builds publicly with the latest technologies to “learn faster, meet founders, and contribute to the ecosystem.”

His most notable build is BabyAGI (March 2023), the first popular open source autonomous agent with task planning capability. The project went viral on Twitter amassing millions of impressions and resulting in tens of thousands of GitHub stars, dozens of Arxiv citations, coverage across major online media publications globally, and many speaker engagements including the inaugural TED AI in San Francisco.

Untapped Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm based in the US, founded in 2020 and led by Yohei Nakajima and Jessica Jackley. The firm is known for leveraging AI and automations and it’s unique “build-in-public” methodology, spanning No Code, web3, AI, and beyond. Examples of AI tools the firm leverages include AI assisted startup research and a founder facing GPT VC Associate. Yohei Nakajima was recently ranked Top 20 thought leader in the 2023 Data Driven VC Landscape report, and has been invited to present on “How to run your VC firm using AI” at events globally such as the a16Z GP-LP Mixer during SF Tech Week.

BabyAGI is an open-source AI platform inspired by human cognitive development, and the first popular autonomous agent with task planning capability. Released in April 2023, it has inspired developers globally to start working on their own autonomous agents. It was initially developed as part of an effort to prototype an autonomous founder, before it was realized that it could be used for more general purposes and introduced in the Task-Driven Autonomous Agent paper before being open sources as BabyAGI on GitHub where it has attracted 18k+ stars. It was quickly picked up by major publications such as Fast Company, Business Insider, Forbes, and Vice, has been discussed on Sequoia’s blog and A16Z’s AI Canon, and led to Yohei speaking as a TED AI speaker.

Prior to Untapped Capital and subsequent work listed above, Yohei has worked closely with startups as a community builder and investor. He started his career in 2009 contributing to the growth of the Los Angeles startup community as a community leader in various roles, organizing educational events and communities for local startup founders. He started his investment career at Techstars in 2014, helping spin up The Disney Accelerator, then as their first Director of Pipeline, supporting sourcing of startups across 30+ accelerator programs. He then joined Scrum Ventures in 2018 as a venture partner on the investment team and SVP of Scrum Studio, their corporate innovation unit, working closely with top global corporations such as Nintendo, where he led the engagement as managing director of Nintendo Switch+Tech.