Team

Naoko Okumoto

Co-founder, Managing Partner

Naoko is the Founder and Managing Partner of Niremia Collective and leads the investment strategy along with the global wellbeing community building.

Naoko is a seasoned investor and technology executive with a proven track record in building new business portfolios within Silicon Valley and Japan. Prior to establishing her own fund, she drove US investments for Mistletoe, a social impact fund, and was an Executive Advisor at Z Corporation, a fund created by Softbank/Yahoo Japan. She was also a founding partner at World Innovation Lab (WiL), a Silicon Valley based VC firm, and was the Vice President of Strategic Partnership Management at Yahoo Inc., managing global joint ventures, growing revenues from $16MM/annual to $520MM/annual.

Naoko’s board participation includes a Non-executive Director at S4 Capital, a board member at Yappli, and a board advisor at Transformative Technology.

Nichol Bradford

Co-founder, Partner

Nichol is the Co-Founder and Partner at Nirmeia Collective. She is also the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Transformative Tech.org, a global ecosystem dedicated to educating, gathering, and activating wellbeing tech founders, investors, and innovators..

Prior to becoming a leader in transformative technology, she served as a senior interactive entertainment executive responsible for strategy, operations, and marketing for major brands that include: Activision Blizzard, Disney, and Vivendi. In her role, she operated World of Warcraft and all of Blizzard Entertainment’s properties in China as well as held a key role on the Vivendi Games team responsible for the Activision-Blizzard merger – an $18B deal and an industry defining event.

Nichol is a lecturer at Stanford University, a graduate of Singularity University’s Global Solutions program, has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. She is a board trustee of the California Institute of Integral Studies, a fellow of the British American Project, served on the board of the Brandon Marshall Foundation for Mental Health, and is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hiroaki Kitano

Senior Executive Advisor

Hiroaki Kitano is the Chief Technology Fellow at Sony Group Corporation. Kitano served as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Executive Vice President of the company from April 2022 to March 2024 and as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Deputy President of the company from April 2024 to March 2025. He joined Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL) in 1993, serving as President and CEO of the company since 2011. In 2024, Kitano established the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature* as one of the Principal Founders.

As a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 to 1994, Kitano built large-scale data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers for which he received the Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). His research contributions continued at Sony CSL and at California Institute of Technology where he helped pioneer and define the field of systems biology, which merges biology and systems science.

Outside of Sony, as an AI expert, Kitano is a member of the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures, the UK’s expert advisory panel for the International AI Safety Report, Japan’s AI Strategy Council and AI Safety Institute (AISI) under Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan. He serves as an adjunct professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. He received the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science in 2009 and was elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2021.

Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation. He was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for the Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art - New York (2001). In 2021, Kitano established the Nobel Turing Challenge, a grand challenge to develop a new engine for scientific discovery.

*Celebrating pioneering women committed to advancing technology for a better society.