WndrCothe technology holding company and investment firm started by founding partners Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has raised its first venture capital round, closing over $460 million in capital commitments.
Katzenberg is known as 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 linked to venture capital deals in a short period of time. “The common thread in all of them is that we’re really looking for founders who we think have an opportunity 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 Nykun, manage $1.3 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.
With its Build strategy, WndrCo often acquires controlling stakes in undervalued technology companies to turn them into top-tiers, 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 portfolio of businesses includes 1Password, Airtable, Databricks, Deel and Figma. Its Seed fund invests early in the next generation of entrepreneurs and has made investments in companies such as Yassir, Material Security, Pilot, Quince, Socket and Twelve Labs.
Katzenberg and Jaswa started fundraising for the new funds a year and a half ago, and Jaswa said they “timed it perfectly” in terms of raising money between when there was a big recession and “a time when people felt like venturing into it had become very frothy.’
“It was a unique moment to raise our first classic venture funds,” he said. “We’ve been lucky to deal with some of the best entrepreneurs and companies, but at the end of the day, when you’re starting a new set of relationships, it takes time.”
The new capital is distributed across new Seed and Venture funds targeting startups that are innovating in the future of work, consumer technology, cyber security and developer infrastructure sectors.
WndrCo does 15 deals a year in seed investments with an average check size of $500,000, Katzenberg said. The seed fund will make “more venture capital investments than we’ve done before” and will spawn one or two companies a year, he said.
Since the new funds, WndrCo has invested in three companies, including Writer, a productivity AI platform for businesses, and Alembic, which helps marketing leaders understand the return on investment of their brand spend. One of its manufacturing companies was created 10 months ago and is still in stealth mode.
The company is looking for new technology that will allow society to solve a problem that has not been solved before. Then, if it can find entrepreneurs who build it, WndrCo gives them money, Jaswa said. This includes more recently artificial intelligence.
“Over the last five months, we’ve seen a pretty significant acceleration in the quality and quantity of opportunities,” Katzenberg added. “That was quite different from 2023. These things typically happen and accelerate around platform changes or platform introductions, and AI for us actually seems to be the next big, transformative moment around technology.”
