Joi Ito

Joichi Ito (伊藤 穰一, Itō Jōichi; born June 19, 1966) is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the president of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is on the board of directors for the Gelephu Mindfulness City in Bhutan where he is also chairman of the Gelephu Investment Development Corporation (GIDC). He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School.

Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies. He notably founded PSINet Japan, Infoseek Japan and Digital Garage of which he is chief architect and board member. Ito is founder and managing partner of Neoteny and GMJP, an early-stage fund investing in web3 in Japan. He is former board member and CEO of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation, and Common Crawl advisory board. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.

Following the exposure of his financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the MacArthur and Knight foundations, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company in September 2019. In March 2026 scrutiny resurfaced after the U.S. Justice Department release of millions of Epstein papers; Ito announced his intended resignation from the Digital Society Initiative on March 31 and Reuters reported Ito would retire as an executive and board director of Digital Garage.