Founding Horiba Radio Laboratory, and incorporating Horiba, Ltd. (1953)

A pioneer among university spin-offs

The heart of this founding is that a student with neither capital nor credit built a company of his own on the strength of technology cultivated in a university laboratory. The equipment amounted to a rented house barely three and a half ken across, and the mainstay of the business shifted twice, from electrolytic capacitors to the pH meter. Even so, a solid technology — Japan’s first glass-electrode pH meter — drew in leading figures of the Kyoto business world as guarantors. The structure by which a technology-centred start-up is supported by local capital and local connections had already taken shape at the moment of incorporation.

The three men who took up the investment and the bank guarantee were later called forerunners of venture capital by Horiba Masao. The support he himself had received, he sought in his later years to repay to the next generation by nurturing ventures in Kyoto. Bridging university knowledge into business, with regional capital sustaining it, overlaps with the very problems that today’s university start-ups face. This founding shows well how that prototype came into being in the Kyoto of more than half a century ago.