Beff closes ¥750m Series A for battery manufacturing software

Beff closes ¥750m Series A for battery manufacturing software

16 October 2026: Beff, a Tokyo startup that builds software for developing and mass-producing batteries, has raised about ¥300 million in a final close of its Series A, bringing the round to about ¥750 million. The company says it has raised ¥950 million in total since it was founded in July 2023.

Not yet independently verified. Genesia Ventures' own post of 1 September 2026 confirms its additional investment in the Series A alongside Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, but it gives no amount and predates the final close. The final-close amounts and the two new investors come from Beff's release alone. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Who put money in

Genesia Ventures leads the Series A. Mitsubishi UFJ Capital invested again, and two new investors joined in the final close: Sumisho Venture Partners, the corporate venture arm of the trading house Sumitomo Corporation, and JM Strategic Innovation Fund, the corporate fund of the JA Mitsui Lease group, run by Spiral Innovation Partners. The money came through a third-party share allotment.

Beff says it will spend it, with the earlier tranches, on hiring engineers outside Japan and on equipment for its own laboratory, to speed up platform development and expand customer support.

Software for the step between lab and factory

Beff's argument is that the battery industry is moving from a few very large, low-cost producers towards smaller, varied production close to home, and that the bottleneck is know-how held by a few experienced engineers plus heavy scrap during ramp-up. Its product, Beff Navigator, is software built on the company's own analysis model. It brings together material data, cell designs, test conditions and measurement results so that the path from development to mass-production validation is held in one digital record.

Beff has now made generally available what it calls a core system for battery manufacturing, combining a Virtual Factory Platform with a Real Factory Platform in which it develops next-generation cells with customers in its own lab. The system uses process parameters and inspection results to catch defects earlier and lift yield during production ramp-up.

Two Nissan alumni, one in Germany

The co-chief executives are Koudai Nagano, who worked on electric-vehicle batteries at Nissan and then led material-processing development for all-solid-state batteries at Toyota from 2018, and Shunsuke Amagai, who worked on EV battery packs at Nissan and from 2016 on advanced battery-pack development at Mercedes-Benz in Germany, where he still lives. The company has bases in Tokyo and Germany.

The new investors framed the deal around supply security. Hidehiro Yamaki, president of Sumisho Venture Partners, said interest in holding battery manufacturing capacity at home "is higher than ever" in Europe, South Asia and the United States. Hiroshi Oka, general partner at Spiral Innovation Partners, said Beff covers the whole chain "from material-level R&D to battery module mass production and quality assurance". Both quotations are our translations of the Japanese release.

Our manufacturing software category lists eight products, none of them specific to battery cell production.

Company profile on TrustList: Beff

Sources

• Beff (PR TIMES release): 電池製造の共通インフラをつくるBeff、シリーズA Finalクローズで累計約7.5億円調達, 16 October 2026
• The Bridge: Beff secures additional ¥300 million for battery development and manufacturing support, 19 October 2026
• Genesia Ventures: investment in Beff, 1 September 2026