Tomo Kumahira

Co-Founder & CEO, WaterOne.ai

Co-Founder and CEO of WaterOne AI and Project Mizu. He has dedicated over a decade to agriculture finance, with a focus on mobilizing capital toward agriculture as one of the most critical and underserved asset classes. At Stanford University, he led Project Mizu, an interdisciplinary research initiative that produced one of the first comprehensive solution maps for water adaptation strategies in agriculture. He currently works with growers in California’s Central Valley to support their transition to a new water reality through data-driven and finance-enabled solutions.

He brings over 10 years of experience across agricultural technology, startup management, and venture and private equity investing. He holds an MBA and MS in Natural Resources Management from Stanford University, where he was the first Knight-Hennessy Scholar from Japan. Previously, he served as CFO at a leading sustainable forestry and nature-based solutions startup in Kenya, where he helped scale operations across 30,000 farmers, supported the planting of 40% of Kenya’s commercial trees, and led more than $50M in blended finance. Earlier in his career, he trained in private equity at Mitsubishi Corporation, focusing on alternative assets across Africa, Asia, the U.S., and Europe, and advised organizations including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Cabinet Office of Japan on blended finance and impact investing. He is a recognized speaker and author on agricultural finance and has received multiple honors, including the Acumen East Africa Fellowship, Robert Bosch Foundation GGF2035 Fellowship, Environmental Finance Magazine’s Deal of the Year Award, and the Climate Policy Initiative Innovative Climate Finance Award.