We don't just fund AI startups. We co-create them.
Start Co-CreatingWe explore breakthrough AI opportunities together, combining your vision with our experience.
Rapid prototyping and market validation to ensure we're building something the world needs.
Hands-on development with our team, leveraging decades of scaling experience.
Growing together from idea to impact, with continuous support and strategic guidance.
Wakai (若い) means "young" or "fresh" - embodying the spirit of new beginnings, untapped potential, and innovative thinking. AI (愛) means "love" - perfectly capturing our passion for nurturing innovation with care and dedication.
As a Corporation - a living body in the truest sense - we embody this duality. We bring decades of experience building at scale, yet remain vital through constant renewal. Like any living organism, we grow, adapt, and evolve with each venture we touch.
We co-create because we understand that the best innovations need more than resources - they need love, patience, and deep commitment to thrive. This is the essence of Wakai Corporation: an organization that stays forever young by incorporating love into everything we build.
Chief Building Officer
Dirk combines deep technical expertise with the curiosity and enthusiasm of someone seeing the world for the first time. He believes the future will arrive faster and be stranger than any of us expect, and that wakai eyes matter more than old playbooks.
His path reflects this philosophy: studying math, computer science, comparative literature, and psychology—each for just two years, because he wanted to learn, not perform. His pattern of diving deep then moving on led him to found a real-time software company in his native Germany and a computer network company in Los Angeles. He was dhm@apple.com, dhm@amazon.com.
Wakai is Dirk's vision of the future of venture capital. Not just investing in AI, but using AI, Amplified Intelligence, to revolutionize how companies get built. Wakai builds custom C-Suite AI partners that learn from every bug fixed, every hire made, every customer won - creating compound advantages that traditional VC can't match.
When he's not co-creating the future with founders or writing about the implications of AI, find him on EUC trails, in the pool, or exploring underwater worlds—always with wakai eyes: curious, gritty, exploring.
Chief Experience Officer
When her peers expected investment banking, Catherine went from pre-med to choose art conservation. Now she applies the conservator's discipline to building companies: seeing what others miss, preserving what matters, and creating conditions for masterpieces to emerge.
Her journey embodies Wakai's philosophy of fresh eyes over prescribed paths. Where others saw a detour from pre-med and finance, she found her calling in the meticulous work of revealing hidden beauty. That same trained eye now spots invisible cracks in company culture, identifies authentic founder genius, and knows exactly when to intervene—and when to simply create the right conditions.
At Wakai, Catherine treats each startup as an irreplaceable original, where the wrong intervention can destroy what makes it valuable. She brings the conservator's paradox to venture: the deepest change often comes from the lightest touch.
Her continuing practice in art conservation at Oak Street Art Conservation isn't a side project—it's live training in patience, precision, and the radical act of caring for what others might discard.
Ready to build something extraordinary together?
Located in San Mateo, California