Masanori Sato, Koji Toshima, Yuki Matsuda, Mitsuhiro Tateishi, Yoshitaro Tominaga, Hirotada Kobayashi, Ryota Sato, and Ryosuke Shigaki, acted as the legal counsel for Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd. for financing for a biotech venture company through a value securitization scheme, which was arranged by Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd.

Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co., Ltd. announced that it had completed financing for Spiber Inc. (“Spiber”), a biotech venture company, through a value securitization scheme (the “Scheme”), in which Spiber was the originator, for Spiber’s “Brewed Protein™️” business, which develops a kind of structural protein material.  The Scheme is different from a standard corporate loan, in that it is an innovative way of financing designed to achieve a large-scale loan to Spiber by utilizing, to the maximum extent, the value of the advanced research and development facilities and other tangible assets of Spiber, such as a large scale production plant in Thailand, as well as the value of its intellectual property and other intangible assets that are the primary assets of Spiber and the source of its competitiveness.

In the midst of an increased need for investment in SDGs companies in recent years, this project realized a scheme in which a wide range of credit investors are able to participate without limiting the method of financing by a startup company to the conventional equity financing and, therefore, is a highly novel and socially significant project that could provide an opportunity for promoting superior research and development and businesses in Japan and facilitating large-scale financing by companies with advanced technological capabilities and credit investment in such companies.

While efforts for ESG and SDGs in all industrial sectors accelerate, there are high expectations for the provision and promotion of financing solutions that support the introduction and commercialization of new or alternative technology that encourages structural reforms in the economy and society.  The firm has played a leading role at the frontier of financial transactions and markets from the dawn of structured finance transactions in Japan to the present day.  In the future, the firm will continue to contribute to the formulation of financial transactions that meet the needs of the economy and society and, in turn, to the further development of financial markets, based on the extensive knowledge and experience of our lawyers.