Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Will Smith is one of the most bankable entertainers in history. Two Academy Award nominations, a music career that ran parallel to his acting, and a global brand that crosses every demographic boundary. He co-founded Westbrook Inc. with Jada Pinkett Smith as a cross-platform content and commerce holding company. He launched multiple production ventures. And in 2018, working with Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda, Japanese basketball player Kosaku Yada, and Nomura Holdings as the anchor institutional investor, he co-founded Dreamers VC, a Los Angeles-based early-stage fund with an explicit mission to bridge American startup ecosystems with Japanese corporate capital. Will Smith investments through Dreamers VC represent something more interesting than a celebrity venture fund: they represent a structural attempt to arbitrage an information gap between two of the world's largest capital markets.

The Bridge Structure

Dreamers VC was designed from the start around a specific insight: Japanese institutional investors want access to early-stage US technology companies, and US startups want access to Japanese distribution networks and corporate relationships. The fund connects those two needs. Honda brought deep relationships with Japanese corporations and institutional capital. Smith brought deal access, brand recognition, and the ability to attract founders who want more than a check.

Nomura Holdings anchored the fund, providing both credibility with Japanese institutional LPs and access to Nomura's corporate network. The result is a fund that operates as a genuine bridge rather than simply a celebrity name attached to a standard venture vehicle. The firm has made 79 investments according to Tracxn, with 11 unicorns in the portfolio.

Notable portfolio companies include Mercury, the banking platform for startups that was acquired by Capital One in January 2026 in a reported $2.6 billion deal. Public, the investing platform. Alchemy, the blockchain infrastructure company. Karat Financial, the creator-focused credit card that raised a $70 million Series B in July 2023. Nitra, a financial services platform for healthcare providers where Dreamers led a $62 million seed round alongside New Enterprise Associates.

The Investment Philosophy

Dreamers VC describes its approach as operator-first: the team has personal experience as users and operators in the sectors where they invest. The firm focuses on early-stage Seed and Series A rounds in technology companies across enterprise software, fintech, consumer, and health. The stated check size range is $500,000 to $3 million for initial positions. As of mid-2023, the most recent tracked investment was in Karat Financial's Series B.

Separately, Will Smith and Honda have made personal investments that sit alongside the Dreamers fund. These include early stakes in Oura, the wellness wearable, and positions in other companies that overlap with Dreamers' portfolio focus.

Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund GP, has talked about how the most interesting fund structures are the ones where the firm's specific characteristics create investment access that generic capital cannot replicate. Dreamers has genuine access to Japanese institutional relationships that most US early-stage funds don't, which is a real competitive edge in certain deal situations, particularly for companies thinking about distribution or expansion in Japan or broader Asia.

Westbrook Inc. and the Content Layer

Alongside Dreamers VC, Westbrook Inc. operates as Smith's content and commerce holding company. It encompasses Westbrook Studios, Westbrook Media, Overbrook Entertainment, and Good Goods, the merchandise business. Red Table Talk Enterprises managed the Smith family's digital content output before changes in family circumstances affected some of those ventures.

The content infrastructure matters for Dreamers' portfolio companies in the same way VaynerMedia matters for Gary Vaynerchuk's investments: it creates distribution assets that can accelerate growth in portfolio companies where media exposure is valuable. Eric Bahn, Hustle Fund GP, has noted that VC firms with owned distribution are increasingly differentiated from those that can only offer capital and introductions. Dreamers' combination of Westbrook content and Nomura institutional relationships gives it a distinctly unusual toolkit.

Angel Squad and the Cross-Cultural Capital Lens

The Dreamers model points to an opportunity that Angel Squad members in emerging markets have understood for years: the most asymmetric early-stage returns often come from identifying where two capital markets are not efficiently connected. Angel Squad's community of 2,500 investors across 50 countries includes many members who are sitting exactly at those connection points, investing in companies that are underfollowed by US-centric funds because of geography or cultural context. The Dreamers VC structure is one of the most clearly articulated examples of this arbitrage working at the fund level. Hustle Fund's own global perspective, with GPs including Shiyan Koh who brings deep Asia expertise, reflects the same insight. Visit hustlefund.vc/squad to learn more about building a global investment lens.

The Takeaway

Will Smith investments through Dreamers VC work because the fund was designed around a real structural gap rather than around celebrity access. The bridge between American startup deal flow and Japanese institutional capital is a genuine information arbitrage. The 79 portfolio companies and 11 unicorns are the output of that structure working as intended. For early-stage investors, the lesson is about fund design: the most durable investment vehicles are the ones where the specific characteristics of the team create access that capital alone can't buy.