Arriba Studio, a Japanese Web3 venture capital firm based in Singapore, has announced a strategic partnership with Forward Research—the founding company behind the decentralized storage network protocol Arweave. Forward Research is investing in Arriba Studio's second fund as part of this partnership. Additionally, Arriba Studio has appointed Tomoya Nagasawa, founder of WeaveDB, as Research Partner CTO. Through this collaboration, Arweave is expanding its presence in Japan, while Arriba Studio empowers Japan to deepen its contributions to the Arweave ecosystem.
Arweave is an indefinitely scalable decentralized storage protocol that leverages advanced algorithmic game theory to permanently store large volumes of data in its network. AO, launched in 2024, is a decentralized supercomputer that leverages Arweave storage to address blockchain scalability issues, enabling the development of advanced applications such as running LLMs on-chain. AO further enables ArFleet to provide temporary storage solutions that are more cost effective than traditional cloud services like AWS by efficiently verifying data on-chain.
Japan is set to open up the Web3 market through regulatory and tax reforms, a change in government leadership, and the increasing participation of leading enterprises in Web3. Through its first fund, Arriba Studio has built a robust network in Japan by investing in top-tier founders, partnering with major enterprises, and collaborating with government bodies, with a strong focus on the gaming and anime industries, but not limited to them.
Led by Tomoya, Arriba Studio will leverage its extensive network to support Arweave Japan, the permaweb accelerator, in enabling Japanese startups to expand globally and international startups to enter Japan. Furthermore, Arriba Studio will advocate for Arweave as the optimal solution for large-scale social implementation through close collaboration with Forward Research and the Arweave ecosystem.
Comment from Takashi Sato, Arriba Studio CEO
We are very excited to announce a strategic partnership between arriba studio and arweave, a leader in distributed infrastructure and distributed computing. arriba has a proven track record of investing in and growing web3 projects in the gaming and entertainment space, which is a strong area of expertise in Japan, and we hope that by connecting the two with the arweave ecosystem we will be able to create useful use cases for web3.
Profile of Tomoya Nagasawa, Arriba Studio Research Partner CTO
After engaging in developing natural language processing technology and AI to accelerate language acquisition, he founded Warashibe, Inc. in 2020 and developed payment solutions and social platforms utilizing blockchain. In 2022, he founded WeaveDB based in UAE and developed decentralized database technology utilizing Arweave. He has globally raised funds and has also received investment from Hub71, supported by the Abu Dhabi government.
Announcement from Arriba Studio (Japanese)
