Hollywood veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg is turning more of his awareness towards tech, with his WndrCo investment decision agency indicating it raised additional than $460 million for venture money cash targeted on the market.
The cash will back businesses concentrated on online protection, the long term of get the job done and customer software program, in accordance to a Tuesday assertion.
“We are certain that the coming ten years, driven by the transformative electricity of AI, will be a amazing time period for entrepreneurship,” Katzenberg and his founding partner Sujay Jaswa, a previous Dropbox executive, reported in the assertion. “This engineering signifies the most substantial revolution considering the fact that the mid-2000s, subsequent the rise of cloud computing, social media, and smartphones.”
Redwood Metropolis-based mostly WndrCo presently counts password security business 1Password, economical services organization Robinhood and app-creating system Airtable among the its investments. Katzenberg and Jaswa founded WndrCo in 2016.
However Katzenberg is finest identified for his extended tenure in the leisure market, including serving as chairman of Walt Disney Studios and chief govt of Dreamworks Animation, he has develop into ever more involved in tech expense.
Most recently, Katzenberg and tech govt Meg Whitman released Quibi, a unsuccessful small-variety streaming video clip app that aimed to contend in the electronic video current market. Although the enterprise lifted $1.75 billion, it struggled to bring in enough audiences to its shows and shut down in 2020 following significantly less than seven months of operation.
The corporation, whose name was shorter for “quick bites,” was geared all-around demonstrates and flicks with episodes that lasted 10 minutes or significantly less.
Quibi supposed to distinguish itself from rivals like TikTok or Instagram with higher manufacturing values, but it launched in the course of the pandemic, did not capture keep of audiences and missed crucial viewership metrics for advertisers.
The strategy of deploying Hollywood-amount generation budgets for short video clips and charging viewers for them turned out to be flawed, when viewers were being flocking to other web-sites that supplied compelling user-produced content material for free.
