Investment Notes: Wonder

Today we’re pleased to share our investment in the pre-seed round of Wonder, an AI creative studio. The round was led by our friends at LocalGlobe and included angels from Universal Studios, Activision Blizzard, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Paramount Pictures.

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Creative AI, reimagined from the inside out

Wonder works with brands, production companies and directors and matches them with a community of AI native creatives to develop teasers, ads, trailers, storyboard and recreations. The founders believe that AI offers unlimited creativity but also scalability and it is bringing this mindset to the building of the studio itself. 

The founders of Wonder believe that the tools to coordinate creative work in the AI age don’t currently exist and they’ll have to start building them in order to drive the outcomes, customer trust and efficiency required for AI to work beyond the ‘tinkering’ stage. Think Figma, but for generative AI video content - built by the people actually using it. 

This investment is a true pre-seed bet on the founding team, Xavier Collins and BAFTA-winning creative director Justin Hackney, who are building Wonder to make it much easier, faster and safer to create enterprise grade creative content with Gen AI than currently possible today.

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The Right to Build It

We’ve known Xavier since the beginning of his professional career when he was one of the co-founders of a Startmate company that went through my (Sam’s) cohort in 2015. He personifies hustle, and has built an impressive operational track record of scaling marketplaces from leading key territorites for Deliveroo in Europe, to building Turo’s European business from $0 to $60M+. He’s also a long-time creative in his own right - producing an EP, founding Lumiere Ventures (a film rights fund), and creating The Shaman List to match startups with capital. Wonder is the opportunity to fuse left with right brain in harmony. 

Justin has spent his career being the creative bridging traditional storytelling and innovation. He started as an actor under Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) before becoming a filmmaker, winning a Young BAFTA and spending a decade working in premium storytelling across ads, trailers and documentaries. Three years ago he recognised the paradigm shift coming to creative industries and founded Real Dreams, a community of top AI creatives that organically evolved into a marketplace-driven agency, and launched the world’s largest AI film festival. 

We are thrilled to be supporting Xavier and Justin on their journey. 

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Keen to work with, work for or otherwise help Wonder? Get in touch via email hello@wonderstudios.com.