Investment Notes: Wonder Studios

We’re thrilled to continue backing Wonder Studios, the AI-native entertainment studio reinventing how world-class stories are made and owned.

When we first backed co-founders Xavier Collins and Justin Hackney at pre-seed, Wonder was a hypothesis: that generative AI, paired with a talent-driven community, could radically expand who gets to tell cinematic stories.

Today, Wonder is proof.

The company has evolved from concept to creative engine with commercially validated, critically admired work for brands, broadcasters and musicians; original IP with breakout reach; and genuine product momentum toward a new kind of studio: one that uses AI not as a gimmick, but as an unlock for expression.

What Wonder is building

Wonder’s model has three pillars:

1. Commercial creative work for brands, broadcasters, and artists producing premium content at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional production.
   
   
2. IP partnerships with existing creators and rights holders to build new creative franchises and expand beloved worlds.
   
   
3. Original IP where Wonder develops, produces and owns next-generation stories from the ground up.

Each pillar reinforces the others. Commercial work generates momentum and trust. Partnerships surface new characters, universes, and worlds. Original IP creates durable creative assets.

Evidence in market

In a short period, Wonder has produced real work for BBC, Sky, Campfire Studios, and more. They produced an AI-powered music video for Lewis Capaldi - a project in collaboration with Google DeepMind, YouTube, and Universal Music Group - unlocking worlds and visuals that are impossible with traditional production constraints, while retaining cinematic integrity and emotional depth.

And Wonder isn’t only executing for others. Their own original anthology series, Beyond the Loop, has achieved over one and a half million views with season two already greenlit. Alongside it: a global competition to surface grass-roots AI filmmaking talent.

Wonder’s flywheel is working.

Product is the leverage layer

While the studio model is the revenue engine today, the long-term unlock is StoryEngine: a platform that integrates text, image and video generation into a single, fluid creative workflow.

For creatives, this solves what the Wonder team calls the “100-tab problem,” where filmmaking today is an awkward mess of standalone AI tools across the browser. StoryEngine turns it into one canvas. One flow. One place where ideas move from imagination, to storyboard, to screen.

Alongside StoryEngine sits a fast-growing creative community - the RealDreams network - now a curated group of AI filmmakers from around the world, moving to the Wonder App for deeper craft, collaboration and opportunity.

Together, these layers - creative studio + owned IP + community + software - form the foundation of a category-defining media company.

Why we continue to back Wonder

The most culturally relevant companies in entertainment emerge at inflection points.

YouTube democratised distribution.

AI now democratises production.

When the cost of “making” collapses, the variable that matters most becomes story quality and the ability to mobilise both talent and audience.

Wonder is building for this future with clarity:

• by pairing Hollywood craft with technology that expands possibility
• by giving storytellers more ownership and more upside
• by using software to increase the speed, fidelity, and ambition of creative work

This is not the end of filmmaking. This is the start of a new creative renaissance. We’re proud to continue backing Wonder Studios on this journey.

Want more? Hear directly from Xavier on this season’s Wild Hearts - a conversation on ambition, ownership, and the creative future being built in real-time.

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