Wavemaker Impact

The firm does not source deals in a traditional venture sense. Wavemaker Impact runs an internal 'venture builder' or 'foundry' process where the team systematically identifies large carbon-abatement opportunities in Southeast Asia, designs the business model, and then recruits a CEO to run the newly formed company. This pre-ideation and validation work happens inside the firm before any external company exists.

Wavemaker Impact operates as a separate climate-focused venture builder within the broader Wavemaker Partners group but shares a common genesis and institutional infrastructure. Wavemaker Partners manages multiple early-stage and deep-tech funds across Southeast Asia and serves as a pipeline for talent and follow-on capital for Wavemaker Impact's portfolio companies.

The firm primarily creates new companies by co-founding them. The team identifies a carbon problem, formulates a business plan, recruits founders, and provides the initial capital to launch the entity. They typically do not take minority stakes in externally founded, later-stage climate startups.

The firm targets the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Southeast Asia, including agriculture and land-use change, built environment and mobility, and energy. Example ventures include WasteX in agricultural biochar and Rize in rice-farming methane abatement.

Investment and venture-creation decisions are led by the partnership group, which includes Marie Cheong, Quinnie Tan, and Steve Melhuish. Paul Santos, the founder of Wavemaker Partners, serves as Chairman, providing strategic oversight and linking the vehicle to the broader Wavemaker ecosystem.

Wavemaker Impact is structured as a venture investment firm that raises external capital but operates more like a company-building platform than a standard blind-pool VC fund. The firm's core activity is venture creation, with a dedicated team of entrepreneurs-in-residence and business designers on payroll.

The firm has publicly stated a target to reduce global carbon emissions by 10% through the companies it builds over the coming decade, a goal that frames its focus on the highest-emitting industrial and agricultural sectors in Asia-Pacific.