WndrCo, a holding company and technology investment firm founded by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has raised its first venture capital fund, closing on more than $450 million in capital commitments.
Katzenberg is best known as the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG, while Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise Associates before joining Dropbox as one of its early employees.
In 2022, we profiled the eight-year-old company after noticing WndrCo's name popping up multiple times in venture capital deals in a short space of time. “The common thread in all of them is we're really looking for founders who we think have the potential to solve an important problem,” Jaswa told TechCrunch at the time.
That vision hasn't changed: Katzenberg and Jaswa, along with general partners Chenli Wang, Anthony Saleh and Jeffrey Nikun, now manage $1.5 billion in assets across build, venture and seed strategies.
Under its Build strategy, WndrCo often acquires controlling stakes in undervalued technology companies and grows them into leaders in their fields, such as digital security companies Aura and Pango. Under its Venture strategy, WndrCo targets founders who are reshaping industries and has aspirations to become the lead institutional investor. WndrCo's venture portfolio includes 1Password, Airtable, Databricks, Deel, and Figma. Its Seed fund invests early in the next generation of entrepreneurs, investing in companies such as Yassir, Material Security, Pilot, Quince, Socket, and Twelve Labs.
Katzenberg and Jaswa began raising money for the new fund a year and a half ago, and Jaswa said the timing was “perfect” for the fundraising, coming between the Great Recession and “a time when people felt like venture was overheated.”
“It was a special moment for us to raise our first traditional venture fund,” he said. “We've been fortunate to be involved with some of the best entrepreneurs and companies, but at the end of the day, building new relationships takes time.”
The new capital will be spread across new seed and venture funds targeting startups innovating in the areas of the future of work, consumer technology, cybersecurity and developer infrastructure.
Katzenberg said WndrCo is doing 15 seed deals a year, with the average investment being $500,000. The seed fund plans to make “more venture capital investments than we've ever made” and start one or two companies a year.
With its new funding, WndrCo has invested in three companies, including Writer, a generative AI platform for enterprises, and Alembic, which helps chief marketing officers understand the return on investment of brand spend. One of these, Build, was founded 10 months ago and remains in stealth mode.
The company looks for new technologies that can solve problems society hasn't been able to solve before, and if it can find entrepreneurs developing those technologies, Jaswa said, WndrCo will fund them. These days, that includes artificial intelligence.
“We've seen a significant acceleration in the quality and quantity of opportunity over the last five months,” Katzenberg added, “and it's just not what 2023 looks like. These things typically happen and accelerate around platform changes or adoption, but AI to us seems to be the next big transformational moment around technology.”