Joichi "Joi" 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 the 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 personal and professional financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019.

Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan. His family moved to Canada and then to the United States, when Ito was about three, to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where his father became a research scientist and his mother a secretary for Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., now Ovonics. The founder of his mother's company, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, was impressed with young Ito, whom he thought of almost as his son. Ovshinsky mentored the boy's interests in technology and social movements, and when Ito was 13, gave him work with scientists, saying, "He was not a child in the conventional sense."

Ito and his sister Mizuko Ito, called Mimi, spent summers in Japan with their grandmother, who taught them about traditional Japanese culture. At age 14, he returned to Japan, when his mother was promoted to president of Energy Conversion Devices Japan. He studied at the Nishimachi International School and, for high school, the American School in Japan in Tokyo. In that phase of his life, Ito also learned "street language, street smarts, and computers". One of the few Japanese using modems before networking deregulation reached Japan, in 1985, Ito had found The Source and the original MUD by his teens (and by 26, was working on his own MUD).

Ito returned to the United States to attend Tufts University as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay. As he deemed his course work too rigid and believed that learning computer science in school was "stupid", Ito dropped out of Tufts to work briefly for Ovonics. Ovshinsky encouraged him to return to school. Ito enrolled at the University of Chicago in physics but later dropped out as the program was overly oriented towards producing practical engineers rather than teaching an intuitive understanding of physics. In the fall of 1985, Ito became the first student to register for a pioneering program of online courses, offered by Connected Education, Inc., for undergraduate credit from The New School for Social Research. Ito also attended Hitotsubashi University, according to his essay in Japanese.

Ito received a doctorate by thesis The Practice of Change from the Graduate School of Media and Governance of Keio University in 2018.

Ito is one of Timothy Leary's godsons—a close, nontraditional familial relationship that Leary reportedly developed for a few of his friends' children. Later, Ito served on the advisory board for the Timothy Leary Archives.