Nascent UK AI creative studio Wonder has secured $3m in pre-seed funding from UK venture capital company LocalGlobe and Australian venture capital firm Blackbird, along with independent individual investors including executives from Google DeepMind and OpenAI.
The studio said it aims to build an AI filmmaking ecosystem and produce films across entertainment and advertising, incubate emerging talent and produce original IP using generative AI.
Individual investors include Mati Staniszewski (co-founder, ElevenLabs), Laura Modiano (head of startups, OpenAI), Ross Dinerstein (CEO, Campfire Studios), Ammaar Reshi (design lead, Google DeepMind), Mika Salmi (founder, AtomFilms), Andre Haddad (CEO, Turo), and Peter Hepworth (former COO, Activision Blizzard EMEA).
Wonder is co-founded by entrepreneur Xavier Collins, a founding partner at Lumiere Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm which specialises in acquiring intellectual property (IP) rights from action films.
Justin Hackney, Wonder’s chief operating officer, and former creative director at ElevenLabs, a New York-based AI audio research and development company, is co-founder.
“The cost of high-end TV and film production typically ranges from $500,000 to $1m per minute, and using AI, we can bring that down to $10,000–$20,000 per minute,” suggested Hackney. “Traditional creative pipelines are too slow, expensive, and gatekept for the pace of AI-native storytelling. Wonder is being built to enable faster production at scale, global collaboration, and fairer ownership for the next generation of creators and entertainment.”
“We’re at an inflection point in history where the power to craft and create visually striking stories is being rapidly democratised through technology,” Xavier Collins, co-founder and CEO of Wonder.
“Storytelling should be about creativity, not overcoming financial and logistical barriers. We’re unearthing the next generation of talent and partnering with the traditional industry to unlock new avenues of creativity and empowering them to do more with less.”
“AI is fundamentally changing how film is produced, and Wonder is operating at the forefront of this shift,” said Ziv Reichert, partner at LocalGlobe.
“We believe they’re building what a 21st century studio should look like: capital-light, AI-first, and built to elevate creative talent rather than replace it. Their model empowers an entirely new generation to tell stories – ones that would otherwise never see the light of day.”
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