Joichi "Joi" Ito is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, writer and scholar focusing on the ethics and governance of technology.
Ito is the chief architect, co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and serves on several for-profit and non-profit boards. He is a director of gmjp, an early-stage web3 fund. He is the director of the Center for Radical Transformation at the Chiba Institute of Technology and associate director of the Health Data Architecture Lab, and visiting professor at the Fujita Medical University. He is a member of The Digital Society Council and the Web 3.0 Study Group of the Digital Agency of Japan.
He served as director of the MIT Media Lab from 2011 to 2019. Ito was chairman of the board of PureTech Health and was previously the board chair and chief executive of Creative Commons. He has served on other boards, including at The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
Ito was an early investor in many startup companies, including Flickr, littleBits, FormLabs, Kickstarter, ASAPP and Twitter.
In 2011, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute for his work as one of the world's leading Internet activists. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The New School in New York City in 2013 and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Tufts University two years later. In 2013, he was inducted into the SxSW Interactive Hall of Fame. In 2017, he received the IRI Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year, the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and the Antiracist Research & Policy Center named Ito to the FD200, a list of 200 people whose work and activism on behalf of equality and freedom reflects the spirit of Frederick Douglass. Ito was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from EPIC in 2019.
He earned a doctor of philosophy degree from Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance in 2018 for his thesis, The Practice of Change. He is a guest researcher at Keio University's Cyber Civilization Research Center.