Huge swathes of cash are flowing from Japan to European tech startups as risk-averse investors favor a more mature entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping to scale the continent’s booming deep tech cluster.

While the European startup and venture capital ecosystem has long operated in the shadow of Silicon Valley, it has become fertile ground for Japanese corporates, whose domestic market is younger.  

Japanese investors or venture capital funds who themselves have Japanese investors, known as limited partners, participated in European financing rounds worth more than 33 billion euros ($38 billion) since 2019 when a trade deal between the European Union and Japan came into force, according to research from venture capital fund NordicNinja and data platform Dealroom.   

For the five years leading up to the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, investment totaled 5.3 billion euros.

In Europe at that time, “there was no Japanese capital other than Softbank,” Tomosaku Sohara, co-founder and managing Partner of Japan-Europe VC NordicNinja, told CNBC. NordicNinja, which has 250 million euros of assets under management, is a joint venture between Japan’s JBIC IG Partners and private equity firm BaltCap.

“Softbank was pretty active already at that moment, because they had acquired Finnish gaming company Supercell,” Sohara said, noting that the acquisition injected life into Finland’s startup ecosystem. 

Now, Mitsubishi, Sanden, Yamato Holdings, and Marunouchi Innovation Partners are among those directly backing European tech, per the report, while Japan-linked venture capital firms such as NordicNinja, Byfounders, and Toyota‘s Woven Capital cut checks to startups on the continent. 

There are over two times more VC-backed startups in Europe than in Japan, per capita, and 4.3 times more unicorns, per the report. 

“They have experience at the corporates and also they have a mindset of entrepreneurship. Japan, unfortunately, is lacking the entrepreneurship mindset,” Sohara added, referring to Europe’s founders, many of whom came from Nokia and Skype.

The top-funded companies with Japanese participation include the U.K.’s autonomous vehicle startup Wayve, which raised $1.05 billion in an investment round in May 2024, British quantum computing firm Quantinuum, which secured 273 million euros in January 2024, and Spanish quantum firm Multiverse Computing, which saw investors cut it a check of 189 million euros in June 2025. The rounds were backed by Softbank, Mitsui and Toshiba, respectively.  

Such companies, however, typically need a lot of growth capital and industrial experience to scale successfully — two elements that Europe famously lacks.  

“Japanese firms — and they’re old, most of them that we’re talking about, right — they’re just sitting on a pile of money. They’ve been saving money throughout the last century, and now they’re starting to spend it, to try to grow as a large corporate and increase their footprint outside of Japan,” said Sarah Fleischer, co-founder and CEO of Germany-based battery materials recycling startup Tozero. 

“You see that investment appetite is way stronger than [in] any strategics I’ve seen here in Germany or in Europe,” she added. Tozero has raised 14.5 million euros to date and counts NordicNinja, Honda and JJC among its investors.

It’s not just about the check. Japanese corporates and industrials have robust manufacturing and automotive know-how, Fleischer and Sohara noted respectively, meaning they are well positioned to plug Europe’s knowledge gaps when it comes to scaling large manufacturing projects.

Fleischer added that Japanese firms have long shored up their critical minerals supply chain and long-established trading firms, meaning they know how to secure essential components needed for the energy transition. For Tozero, this is an added plus, Fleischer said, given it’s in the business of recovering such materials from spent batteries. 

In the age of political uncertainty amid choppy U.S.-China relations, Japan also acts as a good bridge to the Asian markets, Fleischer said.

As many eyes turn to the Middle East for investment, Fleischer said that interest in Japan appears to be ticking up. Anecdotally, “people reach out to me for intros, which is fun, to meet Japanese corporate LPs,” she said, noting that this is a new development for her but that it may simply be because she has such investors now. 

“I think it’s also politically driven as well in Japan, by the government, to position themselves more geopolitically smartly and make sure that the corporates or the industries grow in certain ecosystems, strengthening their positioning as a country,” she said.  

November is historically the best month for the S&P 500, which gains an average of 1.8% during the period, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac.

But the first full trading week of the month saw stocks caught in November rains.

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each lost more than 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite shed around 3% — that’s its largest weekly loss since the tech-heavy index slumped 10% in the week ended April 4.

A few months ago, tariffs were the shadows that stalked stocks. Now, it’s fears that artificial intelligence-related stocks are trading at prices disconnected from what the firms are actually worth.

“You’ve got trillions of dollars tied up in seven stocks, for example. So, it’s inevitable, with that kind of concentration, that there will be a worry about, ‘You know, when will this bubble burst?‘” CEO of DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, Tan Su Shan told CNBC.

Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon also thinks choppy waters might be ahead.

“It’s likely there’ll be a 10 to 20% drawdown in equity markets sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” Solomon said Tuesday at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong.

That said, a pullback isn’t necessarily bad for stocks. It could even present “buying opportunities” for investors, according to Glen Smith, chief investment officer at GDS Wealth Management.

After all, earnings have been “reassuring” despite worries about tech stocks’ high valuations, Kiran Ganesh, multi-asset strategist at UBS, told CNBC. That means the rain might not last and the rally could find a way to run a little longer.

— CNBC’s Lee Ying Shan, Hugh Leask and Lim Hui Jie contributed to this report.

Major U.S. index were mixed. The Nasdaq Composite closed 0.21% lower Friday stateside, but U.S. futures rose Sunday evening. Asia-Pacific markets were up Monday, with South Korea’s Kospi popping more than 3% as of 2 p.m. Singapore time (1 a.m. ET).

China rolls back curbs on rare earths. Beijing said Friday that it would suspend some restrictions on exports of rare earth elements. The move follows talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Oct. 30.

Nexperia impasse shows signs of easing. The Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement Sunday that it had taken steps to allow exports of certain chips from Nexperia’s China facility. Shares of Nexperia parent Wingtech Technology climbed Monday.

U.S. government on track to end shutdown. The Senate on Sunday night stateside passed the first stage of a deal that would end the shutdown. The procedural measure allows other votes essential to the agreement to be held starting on Monday.

[PRO] Chinese sectors benefiting from AI. Earnings season in the country is underway, and while it’s spotlighting some AI-related sectors that have seen growth of up to 57%, others are facing a decline because of fierce price competition.

A global wealth boom is fueling a rise in family office imposters

Fundraisers and fraudsters are presenting themselves as family office representatives, seeking to dupe gullible investors — and then there are also imposters who are in it just for an “ego boost,” several industry veterans told CNBC.

An information vacuum seems to have encouraged imposters. In many markets, genuine single family offices, or SFOs, are exempt from registering so long as they manage only family money. That privacy norm often makes verification hard, said industry experts.

— Lee Ying Shan

China has rolled back a number of restrictions on its export of critical minerals and rare earth materials to the United States, in a sign that a trade truce between the world’s two largest economies is holding.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said Friday that it would suspend some export controls on critical minerals used in military hardware, semiconductors and other high-tech industries for a year.

The suspended restrictions, first imposed on Oct. 9, include limits on the export of certain rare earth elements, lithium battery materials, and processing technologies.

The export relaxations follow talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30.

Beijing also reversed retaliatory curbs on exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and other so-called super-hard materials such as synthetic diamonds and boron nitrides. Those measures, introduced in December 2024, were widely seen as retaliation for Washington’s expanded semiconductor export restrictions on China. 

China classifies such materials as “dual-use items,” meaning they can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Beyond military applications, these critical minerals are used across the semiconductor industry and other high-tech sectors — sectors at the heart of U.S.-China trade tensions.

Beijing has also suspended the stricter end-user and end-use verification checks for exports of dual-use graphite to the U.S., which were imposed in December 2024 alongside the broader export ban.

China dominates global production of most critical minerals and rare earth elements and has increasingly used its export policies as leverage in trade disputes. 

As part of the latest China-U.S. trade deal, the U.S. has agreed to several concessions, including lowering tariffs on Chinese imports by 10 percentage points, and suspending Trump’s heightened “reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports until Nov. 10, 2026.

The U.S. will also postpone a rule announced Sept. 29 that would have blacklisted majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on its entity list.