It all began with a shaking — literally. The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 compelled Yohei Kiguchi to found Enechange Ltd., an energy technology company that promotes efforts to achieve a decarbonized society with digital technology, guided by the noble mission of “creating the future of energy.”
The highly successful company started as a foundation in April 2015, made its initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2020, and achieved a market capitalization of $1 billion in 2021. Enechange is now the leading electric-vehicle-charging and online energy-switching company in Japan, and among the top in the world.
Since its founding, Kiguchi has been hailed as one of the most innovative and successful climate-tech entrepreneurs. Born in Japan and educated in Cambridge in the U.K., Kiguchi splits his time between the countries, seeing the former as the market, and the latter as the inspiration. He is the embodiment, so to speak, of the dynamic U.K.-Japan synergy and spirit.
“I’m among the few, possibly even the only, CEOs of a Japanese public company who live in London. The U.K. is more like a hub for innovation inspiration, with Japan being more like a market for expansion — in our early stages, for instance, we actually deployed a pilot project in the U.K., but then found it more scalable in Japan,” Kiguchi explained.
“The original ideas and technologies came from my studies at the University of Cambridge, where I obtained my doctoral degree in engineering,” he said. Enechange was born from his doctoral research, for which he mathematically modeled energy efficiency using smart meter data, and published two international journals. “When I came into Cambridge, in 2012, way before the Paris Treaty (the 2015 Paris Agreement), the green theme was not yet the fashionable theme, internationally — but Cambridge was already pushing hard to go for the green transition. The U.K., Cambridge and its strong academic and international background, and its improved green initiatives, established the foundation of my career,” Kiguchi shared.
“I am very grateful to the U.K. I’m going to be looking for even more opportunities to contribute as a green entrepreneur and in Japan-U.K. relations.”
