Great Wave Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
Great Wave Ventures is a New York based early-stage venture firm (formerly Agya Ventures) investing in technology that raises productivity across the industrial economy: construction, real estate, logistics, manufacturing, energy, and space. Its current stated focus is Physical AI: robotics, automation, and sensing that relieve labor, power, and material constraints. The firm says it backs founders with vision, a bias for action, and the drive to make the world better, and it describes its founders as mission-oriented teams with ambition and hustle.
Stage Focus
Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A. The firm says it gets in early and tries to help founders at the right inflection point for their business.
Check Size
$250K to $1M per the firm's focus page. Third-party profiles (Dealroom, Superscout) list a fund of roughly $32M, which is consistent with checks of that size. The fund size is not stated on the firm's own site.
Lead Tendency
The firm says it leads and follows ("Lead & Follow"), so lead tendency is recorded as both.
Recent Activity
The site says the firm has invested in 80 startups since 2021, 32 of them from Y Combinator (the portfolio page says 80+ investments; other pages carry older counts of 70+ and 25 YC companies). Press listed on the homepage includes CoStar and The Real Deal coverage of AI in real estate, Bisnow coverage of mass timber in Texas, and Business Wire's October 2022 announcement of Wildr's $2.5M raise. The firm's Tokyo entity was named an ambassador for SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026. Tracxn showed no new investments logged in 2026 as of July, but that reflects public data capture, not necessarily deal pace. Fund status is recorded as unknown.
Portfolio Highlights
The portfolio page names 38 companies, including Airgoods, Allium Engineering, Armadillo, Array Labs, Axle, Branch, BuildingSwell, Cambio, Culdesac, DaisyChain, Generate Design, Hammr, Mechasys, Merlin AI, Nickel, Obsess, Ox, Pantheon Design, Parspec, Pathways, ProjectMark, Relic Care, Rent Butter, RetailReady, Rewbi, STYLY, Sentiyen, Sitewire, Stayflexi, Sugar, Sustain.Life, TYB, Truehold, TwinKnowledge, VBC (Volumetric Building Companies), Venus Aerospace, and Wildr. The mix leans to construction tech, proptech, logistics and supply chain software, and a smaller group of hardware, energy, and aerospace companies. Hexium appears on the homepage but not on the portfolio page.
Team
- Nobu Iguchi, Managing Partner (New York): Has led investments in more than 50 startups since 2020. Previously a senior investment professional at Bridgewater Associates, started at McKinsey, and managed warehouse operations at Amazon. BS Chemistry from Yale, MBA from Harvard Business School.
- Michael Palmer, General Partner (New York): Construction and real estate background. Former Head of Strategy and Real Estate at Volumetric Building Companies, where he oversaw the acquisition of Katerra's assets. Earlier roles at Dow Chemical, DuPont, and Sidewalk Labs corporate development.
- Sayuri Nonaka, Partner (Tokyo): Formerly at Pangaea Ventures and Universal Materials Incubator, with earlier corporate finance roles at MUFG Bank and Dexia.
- Elisha Agravante, Operations Manager.
- Shin Nuriya, Venture Partner.
- Mark Bivens, Venture Partner.
Decision Process
Not stated publicly. The team is small (2 to 10 people per LinkedIn) with two New York partners, so a partnership decision is the working assumption, held at low confidence.
Founder Preferences
Mission-oriented founders with ambition and hustle, with a strong tie to Y Combinator (about 40% of the portfolio). Founders with industrial domain exposure fit the thesis best, given the partners' backgrounds in construction, real estate, and operations.
Geographic Focus
United States for investments. The firm is headquartered in New York with a partner in Tokyo, and its strategic partners are some of the largest real estate developers, general contractors, and institutions in Japan and the United States (Tokyu Fudosan, Mitsubishi Estate, Toda, Obayashi, Hitachi Solutions, Dentsu, and others), which offers portfolio companies pilot and customer access.