Meet our executive team
Masanari Arai
CO-FOUNDER & CEOMasanari Arai is co-founder and CEO of Kii Corporation in Japan. Masanari has more than 18 years experience in the mobile software space in Silicon Valley. He joined Intellisync in 1995 as one of the original members of the company, holding positions as VP Product Marketing, VP Business Development, GM for Asia and President of Intellisync Japan. After Nokia acquired Intellisync, he served as the country manager for Nokia Japan Enterprise System. In 2008, he handled the MBO of Japan business from Nokia to start Synclore Corporation, which acquired Silicon Valley based Servo Software in 2010 to form Kii Corporation.
Prior to starting his career in Silicon Valley, Masanari was the product manager of the original IBM ThinkPad 700 Series. He holds a Master of Computer Science from Toyohashi University of Technology.
Masanari has led industry standardization organizations such as IrDA (Board of Directors) and OMA SyncML.
Naoshi Suzuki
CO-FOUNDER & PRESIDENTNaoshi Suzuki is co-founder of Kii Corporation (f.k.a. Synclore Corporation), focused on creating steady business with wireless operators and phone manufactures. Prior to Kii, he managed the Intellisync business in Japan for various data synchronization server and client software products.
He has also served as product manager and design manager at IBM Corporation and IBM Japan in business line management, architecture, and system design. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Physics from the University of Tokyo.
Masaru Ohta
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER (CFO)Masaru Ohta has 20 years of experience in finance and accounting, and over 10 years of experience in private equity investment and capital markets. He currently serves as executive management to several venture companies as an external board member as well.
Prior to Kii, he served on the boards of Phoenix Capital, one of the largest private equity funds focusing on buyout and business recovery in Japan, where he had led their investment team. He invested around JPY32 billion and brought a large amount of capital gain to the investors of the funds and to the company itself. Prior to that, he was employed by Mitsubishi UFJ Capital(predecessor to UFJ Capital), where he was in charge of corporate planning and business administration further to venture investment.
He started his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in 1991, where he held various advisory roles over 10 years. He had been engaged in audits of financial statements of IT and hi-tech companies and in consulting services, especially business process re-engineering; implementation of ERP software; and in financial advisory services such as M&A. He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and is member of the Japanese Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
Susumu Ishizuka
VICE PRESIDENT, ENGINEERINGSusumu provides technical leadership in building and growing Kii platform. He joined Kii as an early member of Synclore where he built a strong engineering team. Prior to Kii and Synclore, he drove several software projects including building gaming consoles and implementing network protocols like MANET and IPsec.
When he is away from his keyboard, he enjoys juggling, playing legos and Minecraft with his kids. Susumu holds a masters in Semiconductor Physics from the University of Tokyo.
