WndrCo, the holding firm and know-how funding agency began by founding companions Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, raised its first enterprise capital fund, closing on over $450 million in capital commitments.
Katzenberg is well-known for being the previous chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise Associates earlier than becoming a member of Dropbox as one of many firm’s early workers.
We profiled the 8-year-old company in 2022 after we observed what number of occasions WndrCo’s identify was related to enterprise capital offers in a brief time frame. “The frequent thread throughout every little thing is that we’re actually in search of founders that we predict have an opportunity of cracking an vital drawback,” Jaswa instructed TechCrunch on the time.
That imaginative and prescient hasn’t modified. Katzenberg and Jaswa, together with basic companions ChenLi Wang, Anthony Saleh and Jeffrey Nykun, handle $1.5 billion in belongings at present by their Construct, Enterprise and Seed methods.
With the Construct technique, WndrCo usually acquires controlling stakes in underappreciated tech corporations to show them into class leaders, for instance, digital safety corporations Aura and Pango. The Enterprise technique targets founders reshaping industries, with a robust choice to be the lead institutional investor. WndrCo’s enterprise portfolio consists of 1Password, Airtable, Databricks, Deel and Figma. Its Seed fund invests early within the subsequent era of entrepreneurs and has made investments in corporations together with Yassir, Materials Safety, Pilot, Quince, Socket and Twelve Labs.
Katzenberg and Jaswa began fundraising for the brand new funds a year-and-a-half in the past, and Jaswa mentioned they “timed it completely” by way of elevating between the time when there was a significant recession and “a interval the place folks felt like enterprise had gotten too frothy.”
“It was a singular second to lift our first traditional enterprise funds,” he mentioned. “We’ve been fortunate to be concerned with a number of the finest entrepreneurs and corporations, however on the finish of the day, if you’re beginning a brand new set of relationships, it takes time.”
The brand new capital is unfold throughout new Seed and Enterprise funds that concentrate on startups innovating within the areas of the way forward for work, shopper know-how, cybersecurity and developer infrastructure.
WndrCo makes 15 offers a 12 months in seed investing with a median verify dimension of $500,000, Katzenberg mentioned. The Seed fund will do “extra enterprise capital investing than what we had accomplished prior,” and can create one or two corporations a 12 months, he mentioned.
From the brand new funds, WndrCo has invested in three corporations, together with Writer, a generative AI platform for companies, and Alembic, which helps chief advertising officers perceive their return on funding relating to model spend. One in every of its Construct corporations was created 10 months in the past and remains to be in stealth mode.
The agency is in search of new know-how that may enable society to resolve an issue that had not been solved earlier than. Then if it might probably discover entrepreneurs who’re constructing it, WndrCo offers them cash, Jaswa mentioned. This most just lately consists of synthetic intelligence.
“Over the previous 5 months, we’ve seen a fairly vital acceleration within the high quality and amount of alternatives,” Katzenberg added. “That was fairly totally different from 2023. This stuff often occur and speed up round platform adjustments or platform introduction, and AI for us really appears to be that subsequent nice, transformative second round tech.”
