Founder Profile
Hiroshi Mikitani
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Hiroshi Mikitani?
Hiroshi Mikitani is a founder of Rakuten, which was founded in 1997.
- Company founded
- Rakuten
- Founded
- 1997
Background
Mikitani graduated from Hitotsubashi University and joined the Industrial Bank of Japan, which sponsored his MBA at Harvard Business School (1993). Banking work on mergers and corporate finance shaped his later approach to building Rakuten through acquisitions and new business lines.
Founding Story
Hiroshi Mikitani founded Rakuten in 1997 after leaving the Industrial Bank of Japan, and has led it as chairman and CEO since. He built Rakuten Ichiba as a merchant-run marketplace, expanded into credit cards, banking and brokerage in the 2000s, made English the company's official internal language in 2010, and in 2018 committed Rakuten to building Japan's fourth mobile network on cloud-native Open RAN technology.
Hiroshi Mikitani was born in 1965 in Kobe.