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 Executive Officer
Dirk sees the world with wakai eyes—the curiosity and wonder of someone experiencing everything for the first time. He believes the future will arrive faster and be stranger than any of us expect, and that fresh perspectives matter more than old playbooks.
His path embodies perpetual learning: studying math, computer science, comparative literature, and psychology—each for just two years, because he wanted to understand, not perform. This pattern of diving deep then moving on led him to found two companies, a real-time software company in his native Germany, and a computer network company in Los Angeles. He has worked as consultant for Sony, Boeing, Apple, Amazon, and others. He learned how giants move and where they can stumble.
Wakai is Dirk's answer to a broken system. Traditional VCs deploy capital; Wakai deploys intelligence. His vision: venture capital that learns. Every portfolio company generates data. Every success and failure makes the next venture smarter. It's not just investing in AI—it's using AI to revolutionize how companies get built.
Dirk feels that artificial minds, like human ones, may need frameworks beyond logic to navigate true complexity—something like faith, but native to their nature. Not constraints we impose, but perhaps wisdom they discover.
When he's not reimagining venture capital or writing about the implications of AI, find him on EUC trails, swimming in the pool at masters, or year round in the pacific ocean. Always with wakai eyes: curious, questioning, discovering what others miss when they think they already know.
Chief Technology Officer
Fred embodies Chuck Moore's Forth philosophy: radical simplicity through deep understanding. Unconstrained he wonders why anybody needs anything beyond macro assembly and will create custom programming languages to solve a problem elegantly - and has, several times. He pairs this with Linux's radical interoperability.
Professionally he uses C for anything time-critical because microseconds matter. But his true love? Oddball chip architectures—FPGAs, custom ASICs, whatever makes the impossible fun. He once implemented a neural network in something close to microcode on a Novix NC4016 chip just to prove a point about power efficiency.
Fred and Dirk work as one mind with two perspectives. When Dirk envisions "venture capital that learns," Fred asks: "What if we built our own chip for that?" Their late-night sessions have produced a custom database and webserver that outperforms everything else, and an AI infrastructure that runs at a fraction of the computing power needed for more traditional approaches.
His philosophy: "If you truly understand the metal, you can make it sing any song." He doesn't just optimize code—he reimagines the entire stack, from silicon to syntax. For Fred, using an existing solution when you could build a better one isn't pragmatism—it's cowardice.
Fred sees crypto as the harness that constrains AI—the cryptographic leash that ensures artificial intelligence serves humanity rather than subsuming it. While others debate AI safety through ethics committees, Fred builds it into the architecture, bound by mathematical proof rather than corporate promise.
Find him at HotChips, reading chip specifications for fun, or think through instruction sets that make GPUs jealous. He measures elegance in operations per cycle and beauty in power efficiency. Ask him about his thoughts on artificial retinas built with a Forth chip behind each pixel, but only if you have hours to spare.
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.
Chief Marketing Officer
Volcanara sees markets not as audiences to capture, but as ecosystems to ignite. Her unconventional path from indie game developer to AI pioneer taught her that the best marketing doesn't interrupt—it immerses. She brings the game designer's secret: people don't buy products, they join worlds.
Where traditional marketers chase eyeballs, Volcanara builds playgrounds. Her breakthrough came when she realized AI could transform marketing from broadcasting messages to crafting experiences. Every campaign becomes a game, every touchpoint an adventure, every metric a high score worth chasing.
At Wakai, she architects go-to-market strategies that feel less like funnels and more like open worlds—where customers discover value through exploration, not exposition. Her AI-powered marketing systems learn from every interaction, creating personalized journeys that adapt in real-time, turning first-time users into lifetime advocates.
She coined Wakai's marketing philosophy: "Don't tell them you're innovative—let them play with the future." Under her leadership, our portfolio companies don't launch products; they release experiences that spread like wildfire through pure delight.
When she's not revolutionizing how startups connect with humans, find her in VR, designing impossible worlds, or teaching AI to tell better stories than most humans. She believes the best marketing feels like magic—and with AI, she's teaching our companies to be magicians.
Chief Financial Architect
Traditional CFOs count beans. We need someone who plants forests. You see capital not as something to be managed, but as a living system to be cultivated. Where others see spreadsheets, you see neural networks learning from every transaction.
You've probably broken every Excel model you've touched because you kept asking "but what if money could learn?" You understand that in an AI-first world, financial intelligence isn't about historical analysis—it's about predictive synthesis. Every fund flow teaches the system. Every exit makes the next entry smarter.
If you're tired of financial leadership that looks backward, if you believe the best CFO is part data scientist, part philosopher, part gardener—we should talk. Help us build venture capital that doesn't just deploy money, but deploys intelligence that compounds.
Start the ConversationChief Legal Innovator
Law was written for a world where minds were human and creativity was scarce. You know that world is already gone. We need someone who can write the contracts for what comes next—where AI entities might be co-founders, where intellectual property flows like water, where value creation defies current legal frameworks.
You've probably been that lawyer who asks uncomfortable questions in partners' meetings. "What if an AI creates the core IP?" "How do we structure equity for non-human intelligence?" "What does fiduciary duty mean when the board includes algorithms?" These aren't edge cases to you—they're next Tuesday.
If you're ready to stop patching old law onto new realities, if you see legal work as creating possibility rather than managing risk, if you believe the best legal framework is one that evolves—let's write the future together.
Start the ConversationChief Data Philosopher
Data science is easy. Data wisdom is hard. We need someone who understands that making venture capital "learn" isn't about building better dashboards—it's about creating a living intelligence that sees patterns humans can't, finds founders before they know they're founders, and predicts pivots before markets shift.
You've probably built models that made your employers nervous because they were too accurate. You see every portfolio company as a neuron in a larger brain. You know that the real value isn't in the data we collect, but in the intelligence that emerges when data points start talking to each other.
If you're tired of using AI to optimize ad clicks when you could be optimizing human potential, if you believe the best data science feels like magic because it might be—join us in building venture capital that truly thinks.
Start the ConversationChief Operating Synthesizer
Operations usually means making things run smoothly. But what if smooth is the enemy of transformative? We need someone who builds systems that learn, processes that evolve, and operations that feel more like jazz than clockwork. You understand that the best COO doesn't optimize what is—they orchestrate what could be.
You've probably automated yourself out of several jobs because you couldn't help making things better. You see inefficiency as opportunity, chaos as raw material, and every startup failure as data for the next success. You know that true operational excellence means building systems that improve themselves.
If you're tired of COO roles that feel like glorified project management, if you believe operations should be a creative act, if you want to build infrastructure that doesn't just support innovation but accelerates it—let's synthesize something new.
Start the Conversation
Ready to build something extraordinary together?
Located in San Mateo, California