Risa Ishii

Risa Ishii is a Principal at Great Wave Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. In this role, she directs investments ranging from $100,000 to $1 million into seed and Series A startups operating across the climate technology, logistics, robotics, and smart city sectors. Before joining Great Wave Ventures alongside Managing Partner Nobu Iguchi, Ishii spent several years at Plug and Play Tech Center, where she served as Director of Japanese Partnerships and Senior Partnerships Manager from 2018 to 2021. Her earlier career includes a corporate banking role at Mizuho Financial Group between 2017 and 2018, and she later served as a guest speaker for the Stanford e-Hiroshima program in 2021. Ishii currently focuses on deploying capital into early-stage enterprise and consumer internet companies building solutions for the physical world.