WndrCoThe holding company and technology investment firm founded by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg has raised its first venture capital fund, closing over $460 million in capital commitments.
Katzenberg is well referred to as the former president of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Before joining Dropbox as one of the company’s first employees, Jaswa was a principal at New Enterprise Associates.
We profiled this 8-year-old company in 2022 after noticing how many times the WndrCo name was associated with venture capital deals in a short time period. “The common thread through it all 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 vision has not modified. Katzenberg and Jaswa, along with general partners ChenLi Wang, Anthony Saleh and Jeffrey Nykun, today manage $1.3 billion in assets across their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
Through its Build strategy, WndrCo often acquires controlling stakes in undervalued technology corporations to show them into category leaders, similar to digital security corporations Aura and Pango. The Venture Strategy targets founders transforming industries, with a strong preference for being a leading institutional investor. WndrCo’s portfolio of ventures includes 1Password, Airtable, Databricks, Deel and Figma. His seed fund invests early in the next generation of entrepreneurs and has made investments in corporations similar to Yassir, Material Security, Pilot, Quince, Socket and Twelve Labs.
Katzenberg and Jaswa began fundraising for the latest funds a 12 months and a half ago, and Jaswa said they “timed it perfectly” in terms of raising funds between a period of severe recession and “a period where people were willing to take risks became too frothy.”
“It was a unique moment to raise our first classic venture capital funds,” he said. “We have been fortunate to work with some of the best entrepreneurs and companies, but ultimately it takes time to establish new relationships.”
The latest capital is distributed across latest Seed and Venture funds, which goal startups innovating in the areas of the way forward for work, consumer technologies, cybersecurity and development infrastructure.
Katzenberg said WndrCo does 15 seed deals a 12 months and the average check size is $500,000. The seed fund will “invest more in venture capital than what we’ve done before” and create one or two corporations a 12 months, he said.
With the latest funding, WndrCo has invested in three corporations, including Writer, a generative AI platform for businesses, and Alembic, which helps CMOs understand the ROI of brand name spend. One of the Build corporations was created 10 months ago and is still in hidden mode.
The company is looking for latest technology that can allow society to unravel a problem that has not been solved before. Then, if it could find entrepreneurs to build it, WndrCo will give them the money, Jaswa said. Recently, this has been the case with artificial intelligence.
“We have seen quite a significant acceleration in the quality and quantity of opportunities over the last five months,” Katzenberg added. “It was a very different event than 2023. These things tend to happen and accelerate as platforms change or are introduced, and artificial intelligence seems to us to be the next great, transformative moment in technology.”