Mitsuru Izumo Email & Phone Number

Izumo is a founder of Euglena Co., Ltd., the world’s first biotechnology company that succeeded in the outdoor mass cultivation of microalgae “euglena” for a healthy diet.In 1998 when Izumo was a university student, he participated in an internship program at Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He met Professor Muhammad Yunus, who has been serving as the 5th Chief Adviser of the interim government of Bangladesh. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. This experience of meeting Dr. Yunus in person motivated him to tackle global malnutrition problems for human beings, especially children in poverty and ultimately led him to found the nutritious algae food company.He devoted himself to researching and cultivating the nutrition-rich algae “euglena” for commercial production.In 2005, Izumo succeeded in outdoor mass cultivation of “euglena” after years of Research & Development efforts and founded Euglena Co., Ltd. to start a healthcare business.He successfully and rapidly grew its business and the company was listed in the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2014.Following successful business growth, the company launched the “Euglena GENKI program” in 2014 where the company started distributing of “Euglena” school lunches to 10,000 school children every day all over Bangladesh.He won “World Economic Forum (Davos Conference) Young Global Leaders”, as well as “the First Japan Venture Award, Prime Minister’s Award” in 2015. In 2020, he became the youngest person to be appointed as vice-chair of the Japan Business Federation(“Keidanren”), an organization composed of major Japanese companies.Algae euglena is known to exist in diverse varieties, and Euglena Co., Ltd. is the first company in the world to successfully extract oil from algae euglena to produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel.In 2021, the company was awarded the "Japan SDGs Prime Minister Award" in recognition of its excellent efforts in developing SAF to combat global warming and its contribution to the SDGs goals of solving malnutrition in Bangladesh.

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  The University Of Tokyo

  Agricultural Business And Management