Gamma
A few months ago I was approached to join Wave. When making decisions like this, I ask myself a couple of questions: what is the purpose of this work, and what is the concrete vision that will give me a reason to keep raising my own bar for the next few years. Having followed Wave for a while, I felt that right now I could see the purpose and vision clearer than ever before.
The rest of this post is my personal view of what that vision is and why I have such strong conviction about it. It’s broad on purpose, but I’ll write more as it becomes real.
Wave started out as the Nordics’ first dorm room fund in 2016, and over the years has evolved into a key backer of the most exceptional Nordic talent. From a €1.5M student experiment into a €10M cross-Nordic platform run by the next generation.
Over the years, Wave has had a full spectrum of forms and directions, but the same idea has always stayed at its core; the future-defining companies will be built by the next generation.
The Nordics have always been a region of first movers. Nokia, Ericsson, Spotify, the list goes on. The next generation has the proof that truly global, category-defining companies can be built from the Nordics, and they have been given the opportunity to grow up in the most global environment in history, with access to technology that has commoditized learning to a higher degree than ever before. This has led to the exceptional talent showing their potential earlier and earlier. This talent is our peers. Those people who we grew up with. The friends of our friends. The siblings of the people closest to us. The people we went to school with.
The previous funds have given us conviction in the thesis. With Fund III it’s not only about increasing the fund size five fold. It’s about building a fund that supports the future-defining founders from day -1, and takes action before their potential is obvious. We’re putting that ambition into practice through initiatives that extend our role way beyond just writing cheques. Some are already live.
The thesis is just a validated idea, the execution is what actually creates our edge.
And finally, the thing I’m the most excited about (I know it’s cryptic, but bear with me): the next stage isn’t only about each of us being exceptional at what we do. It’s about what becomes possible when that execution compounds across the team. That’s gamma.
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Arttu Kaitila
October 2026