Woven Capital’s New Mobility VC’s Plans for $800M Fund

• Toyota’s Woven Planet mobility business just welcomed a new venture capitalist.
• She’s looking for startups and founders racing to build sustainable cities.
• Insider spoke with her about which investment opportunities she hopes to find.

Woven Capital, the corporate venture-capital arm of Toyota’s Woven Planet mobility subsidiary, welcomed a new partner Thursday in its effort to make cities more sustainable by backing white-hot transportation, software, and infrastructure firms.

Nicole LeBlanc, a former partner of the sustainable-urban-tech VC firm 2150 and a former lead for corporate VC and partnership strategies at Google’s Sidewalk Labs, is looking for startups and founders who fit that model. And that means going past how people get around.

“Mobility is such a core component of that, but it can’t be done in isolation,” LeBlanc, who also was previously a director at Canada’s largest seed fund, BDC Capital, told Insider in an exclusive interview.

Woven Capital is a $800 million global investment fund that was founded last year in Tokyo. In its portfolio, it has companies like the autonomous-delivery firm Nuro and the fleet-software company Ridecell. (It differs from the automaker’s VC arm Toyota Ventures.)

LeBlanc shared what she’s looking for in founders and her advice for finding success.

Advice to founders

LeBlanc offered several key pieces of advice for founders, flexibility being the first.

“Every startup, whatever their first pitch deck is, it’s never what they actually end up scaling with,” she said. “Things come completely out of left field that are negative, and you really have to figure out how to deal with that.” 

Communication and transparency are vital, too.

“The ability to have these trusted, transparent conversations with some of your investors is really important to be able to truly build the company and scale it to what it needs,” LeBlanc said.

“You need to be able to be thinking two or three steps ahead,” she added. “Be at the right place at the right time.”

LeBlanc recommended that startups ask themselves key questions.

“What’s the right path for your investors? What’s the right path for your team?” LeBlanc said. “How do you actually use your board for forward-looking elements so that you spend the majority of your time talking about opportunities, how you could actually grow and scale your company really big and take advantage of the market or the momentum that you have?”

What LeBlanc is looking for

Companies working on multimodal transportation, software, and more fit into LeBlanc’s idea of a sustainable city. 

“What really excites me is the intersection of verticals,” she said. “It’s where mobility meets the built environment. It’s where mobility meets infrastructure.”

That could mean electric-vehicle charging, supply-chain and last-mile-logistics companies, sidewalk robots, or other technologies that integrate with what municipalities have already implemented.

“For me, it’s all about the founder’s story, why they’re doing it, how they’re going to adjust when the market changes,” she said, adding that working with founders from diverse backgrounds was a priority. 

LeBlanc said she wanted to find startups that answer these questions: “What does the future of a sustainable city do? How do we need mobility to be sorted in order to build sustainable cities? And how can we actually see what different modes and what different infrastructure and what different elements really fit in all of these different global cities?”

She’s also looking for something that can scale.

“There’s lots of solutions out there that can really make our cities more sustainable. The issue is scale,” LeBlanc said. “Being able to crack that nut is really what’s inhibiting us from having global sustainable cities.”