NSV Wolf Capital Announces a First Close to its $100M NSV Wolf Capital V, L.P.

Strategic Muscle for Japanese Enterprises Grappling with the Deluge of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Los Altos, CA, USA, October 16, 2025

NSV Wolf Capital’s venture funds I through IV have served as extensions of Japanese corporate venture initiatives since 2011, always with the goal of bringing the most impactful Silicon Valley initiatives to Japan. On September 30, 2025, we came to the first close of its fifth fund, NSV Wolf Capital V, LP. It will support emerging small VC funds and their portfolio companies engaged in building the next wave of AI enabled technologies aimed at large enterprises serving financial, industrial, medical, space, and defense sectors. As a merging of the language and robotic modes of AI development proceeds, the world’s companies will be showered with product, service, and process innovations portending an economic upheaval rivaling the original industrial revolution.

Included in the Fund’s first closing are Money Forward, Inc., Fixstars Corporation, and BrainPad Inc., each company known as innovators in their own fields, but wishing to stay at the forefront of what they know is the coming AI revolution.

Said Money Forward’s Sandy Kimura, Executive Officer of Money Forward, Inc. and CEO of Money Forward America, “I’m truly thrilled to be joining NSV’s fifth fund, which is dedicated to the real-world impact AI will have on business. Having NSV as a partner means gaining both deep insight and unparalleled reach with guidance that is pragmatic and rooted in what’s actually happening as new AI companies emerge in Silicon Valley. This perspective will help ensure our own business not only keeps pace with the rapid evolution of AI but also stays ahead of the curve.”
 

In conjunction with this closing, Hiroshi Menjo, co-founder, managing partner, and Chairman of NSV Wolf Capital, also announced that Naoki Shibata, former Executive VP of Rakuten, long time angel investor, and the author of the recently published best seller, After AI, has joined NSV Wolf Capital’s team as Managing Partner.

Said Menjo, “We are thrilled and excited to have Naoki join us, bringing to bear not only his stellar academic and corporate background, but also his awesome role as a first check in more than a hundred early stage AI deals. Naoki will be a major addition to our long standing efforts to help our Japanese LP partners better understand and adapt to the ever coming onslaught of entrepreneurial inspired innovations coming out of Silicon Valley. Naoki’s pragmatic approach to AI, ‘let’s work very hard to find what works and go with that,’ we at NSV see as the antidote to those confused and overwhelmed with the enormity of the venture community’s generally over-hyped response to AI.”

About NSV Wolf Capital:

NSV was started as a consulting firm in 2002 by long term friends, Hiroshi Menjo, and Richard Melmon, dedicated to helping Japanese enterprises “follow the money,” that is, follow where the venture capital industry was placing its bets on future trends coming out of the Internet revolution of the 1990’s. Masami Kato joined the firm in 2007 to expand and pursue new opportunities. The firm launched its first fund in 2011, realizing that the best way to impact enterprise transformation to actually “take an action” was to ensure it had some “skin in the game,” something best accomplished by becoming part of the venture industry.

“Involving our clients more directly in the entrepreneurial wisdom coming out of Silicon Valley required getting them out of the habit of reading and then filing away our consulting reports, and into the habit of considering making actual investments in the new technology always on the march,” said Masami Kato, co-founder and Managing Partner at NSV Wolf Capital.

The firm employs a “hybrid” venture model to ensure it has the widest possible lens on the emerging AI landscape. A portion of its resources are deployed to fifteen to twenty individual venture funds which become its forward looking eyes as they seek out and invest in a wide range of early stage AI related startups. It is from this portfolio of several thousand that NSV Wolf Capital picks those few most promising to support.  “The hybrid model provides the most capital efficient mechanism for our LPs to gain access to the broadest and most promising startups,” says Richard Melmon, Managing Partner Emeritus and co-founder of the firm.

In addition to Menjo, Kato, Shibata, and Melmon, NSV Wolf Capital partners include partners Dan Kimerling and Nathan Pacer.

https://www.nsv.com/

About AI:

Artificial intelligence (AI) will dislocate industrial, economic, and social structures on a scale not seen since the original Industrial Revolution. Whereas the steam engine mechanized human and animal muscle, AI mechanizes cognition itself. The result: A global cognitive redo transforming industry at an unprecedented pace. The steam transformation replacing muscle took two centuries; the digital transformation replacing ink and paper took a century; the cognitive transformation amplifying human thought will take only a decade.

The digital revolution was driven by Moore’s Law; it made axiomatic that the cost of computation would shrink predictably over time. Once this was understood, in the early 1970’s, a rational roadmap for future industrial development became clear. Investment decisions driven by Moore’s Law were quite predictable at the macro level. Things done today would get better faster cheaper tomorrow. This dynamic defined the structure of the venture capital industry and its relationship with the entrepreneurial community that has existed up to today. It also was consistent with the way Japanese enterprises interacted with that venture community, largely as passive investors.

The cognitive revolution is intended to make sure that things done today will not be the same as things done tomorrow. This is a new world from Moore’s Law times. Humans had never had reason to think hard about the science of thinking. Doing so is confusing. Executing the best systems that think will turn out to be about more than scaling, which will make the current era more complicated than the Moore’s Law era.

How to use data to amplify human thinking for meaningful gains in productivity is the task. Because we do not know how humans actually think, exploiting AI will be for some time an art rather than a science. Success will be measured by actual business success. Run the experiment. See what works.

In the short term, this will mean a more uncertain landscape for strategic clarity at the enterprise level than in past decades. Enterprises will not be able to simply see through to the better, faster, cheaper paradigm of decades past. Following actual results of early stage companies will be a more reliable method than mere extrapolation from Moore’s Law.

Japanese large enterprises have historically thrived by consciously choosing to be “slow followers.” In perfecting what had been invented elsewhere, and then mastering scaled production, Japan became a global leader in automobiles, electronics, semiconductors, and precision manufacturing.

The results have been impressive. But today’s challenges may require the DNA of the Japanese enterprise to change. In particular, headquarters outreach to Silicon Valley may need to be reshaped away from the classic slow follower values, allowing more risk to be taken in the form of participating in early stage AI related investments.