WndrCo, the technology holding company and investment firm created by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has raised its first venture capital fund, closing more than $450 million in capital commitments.
Katzenberg is well known for being the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Jaswa was a director at New Enterprise Associates before joining Dropbox as one of the company’s first employees.
We profiled the 8-year-old company in 2022 after noticing how many times WndrCo’s name was associated with venture capital deals in a short period of time. “The common thread through all of this is that we’re really looking for founders who we think have a chance to solve an important problem,” Jaswa told TechCrunch at the time.
This view has not changed. Katzenberg and Jaswa, along with general partners ChenLi Wang, Anthony Saleh and Jeffrey Nykun, today manage $1.5 billion in assets through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
With the Build strategy, WndrCo often acquires majority stakes in underappreciated technology companies to make them category leaders, for example digital security companies Aura and Pango. The Venture strategy targets founders who are reshaping industries, with a strong preference to be the lead institutional investor. WndrCo’s venture capital portfolio includes 1Password, Airtable, Databricks, Deel and Figma. Its seed fund invests early in the next generation of entrepreneurs and has invested in companies such as Yassir, Material Security, Pilot, Quince, Socket and Twelve Labs.
Katzenberg and Jaswa began raising money for the new funds a year and a half ago, and Jaswa said they “timed their fundraising perfectly” between when there was a major recession and “a period where people wanted to take risks.” had become too foamy.
“It was a unique time to raise our first traditional venture capital funds,” he said. “We’ve been fortunate to collaborate with some of the best entrepreneurs and companies, but ultimately when you start a new series of relationships, it takes time. »
The new capital is split between new seed and venture funds that target startups innovating in the areas of future of work, consumer technology, cybersecurity and developer infrastructure.
WndrCo closes 15 deals a year in seed investing with an average check size of $500,000, Katzenberg said. The seed fund will make “more venture capital investments than we were doing before” and start one or two companies a year, he said.
With the new funds, WndrCo has invested in three companies, including Writer, a generative AI platform for businesses, and Alembic, which helps CMOs understand their ROI on brand spending. One of his companies Build was created 10 months ago and is still in stealth mode.
The company is looking for new technologies that will allow the company to solve a problem that has not been solved before. Then, if it can find contractors who build it, WndrCo gives them money, Jaswa said. This more recently includes artificial intelligence.
“Over the last five months, we’ve seen a pretty significant acceleration in the quality and quantity of opportunities,” Katzenberg added. “It was quite different from 2023. These things usually happen and accelerate around platform changes or the introduction of the platform, and AI seems to us to be the next big transformation moment around technology.”
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