29 Dec 2025
Xavier Collins
Hello world,
Hope you’re enjoying the Holiday period and getting some well-earned rest. I wanted to use the downtime to put together a slightly longer-than-normal note on the year that was and what lies ahead.
At Wonder, we have a method of drafting the press release and working backwards, we put out into the Universe what we’re going to achieve and why, so it would be remiss of me to not follow my own advice.
To this end, I wanted to draft up and map out publicly what we’re going to achieve in 2026, the year of the Flywheel.
To understand why 2026 is the year of the flywheel, I need to first set some context on 2025 and what we achieved in our first year of operation.
2025 - Laying the Foundations
As I sit here on the cusp of 2026, it is wild to think that this time last year, Wonder had 0 employees and $0 of funding. Back then it existed as an idea, set out in a relatively sparse pre-seed deck. In the words of Scott Belsky, it was ‘amateur’ - and he wasn’t wrong, albeit an email response I look forward to reminding him of one day.
As we enter 2026, we’re now 30 strong with offices in London, NY, LA and SF. Our ability to attract some of the world’s best talent across creative, operations, engineering and advisory has been our superpower and will remain so.
The beating heart of what makes Wonder unique is our ability to seek out as well as help others find signal in the noise. So much of our best talent has been inbound driven by the mission behind Wonder and the authentic pursuit of what we’re unlocking - a new dawn of creativity. A world with fewer gatekeepers, where filmmakers become founders and artists become entrepreneurs.
It’s this world-class and mission-driven team, organised and structured around a clear roadmap (outlined below) that drove top percentile shipping velocity in 2025. It was a big year… but what did we achieve and why does it matter?
I’ve attached our original deck here. This is what we used to raise our $3m pre-seed from Local Globe and Blackbird Ventures (Shout out to Ziv and Samantha). As you can see, much is now out of date including the company name….
One slide however, remains current and in razor-sharp focus. Attached below is the slide setting out what we’re (still) building and why - a path that we’ve ruthlessly executed against. A path that only becomes clear when you zoom out - a Nazca line mapping out the reinforcing flywheel of Wonder - a wheel that turns across the four key pillars of our business..
Wonder’s foundations
In 2025, we built and structured the team around four key pillars:
(1) Agency (2) IP (3) Story Engine (4) Platform ‘community’
The Wonder Agency
We started with agency for a number of reasons. Firstly, there was clear product market fit - I believe the founders should stay on sales (and not hire for GTM) until the company passes $1m of revenue. You have to feel the air in your sails, learn when to tack and harness the winds that blow against or for you.
Luckily, we passed $1m within our first 6 months, fuelling the business with cash flow and freeing us to invest in higher margin and longer term revenue streams (IP) and proprietary technology (Story Engine and Platform) without needing to over-monetise these levers early in their infancy.
The agency has been the first gear of the car - bringing us up to speed. Existentially relevant in year one but less critical as time goes on.
It’s fuelled us with work, allowing us to come up the experience curve quickly, it’s built our brand with selective projects and helped establish Wonder as one of the world’s preeminent AI studios that can handle some of the most complex and highest pressure briefs, including or potentially including:
A music video with Lewis Capaldi and Google Deep Mind
A documentary with Emmy Award winning Campfire Studios
Ads in Time Square with ElevenLabs and DeepMind
The agency has also allowed us to hire, train and engage a new generation of creative talent, often hiring the best and brightest we see on the Wonder App (our community platform designed to help power the AI creative industry).
IP and Reimagining Ownership
Last year we made two significant steps into IP, first with our Anthology and second with our kids animation project Maxi and Helium.
The anthology was our first real success, securing over 1 million views, helping to launch the profile of our filmmakers and receiving distribution offers from streaming platforms (more to come…).
We partnered with some of the world’s leading AI companies (fal, Freepik, Kling and ElevenLabs) to develop and package up five short films and in doing so pioneer a new model for emerging filmmakers.
In 2026 and onwards we’re going to build the Y Combinator of IP and unearth the next generation of filmmaking talent. We’ll be releasing 6 new short films, creating bigger and more integrated partnerships with the world’s biggest tech companies and working with a blend of world-class (Oscar-winning) traditional filmmakers and emerging AI-native creators.
We’re hoping to open source our DREAM framework, to help unlock film and concept financing for this next generation of creatives. Wonder’s version of a SAFE, purpose-built for the Anthology model.
With Maxi and Helium, we showed that you can strive for Pixar quality at software speed. In months we wrote, developed, produced and launched a short animated series based on Nordic bestseller. We launched it in multiple languages from day one (thanks to ElevenLabs and Youtube) and started to sow the seeds of a new economic model - where IP owners don’t need to spend millions, wait years or lose control in turning a local hit into a global success.
Maxi & Helium
As we enter 2026, we’re going to double down on both of these commercial models and build the muscle of developing and distributing world-class IP, partnering with top creatives in the process.
Story Engine: The Force Multiplier
Our technology is the aspect of the business we speak the least about. That is going to change… but not quiet yet.
Suffice to say that a fundamental component of our ability to scale the business across Agency and IP will be our ability to create, collaborate and produce high production value content at scale. Our key metric is cost per minute which itself is a function of technology cost (API calls) and time cost (human in the loop workflows).
We are entering a world in 2026, where each incremental episode or ad in a series campaign will be easier and faster to create than the last. We welcomed the founding team of Playbook3D as employees and Adobe Ventures as well as the founders of Freepik, fal and ElevenLabs as investors last year. All united in their belief that what we’re building under the surface can become a game changer when applied to episodic content creation at scale.
Critically, we have set an ambitious project but a narrow scope, applying maximum force to the smallest possible surface area. In other words, for the time being, our Story Engine is not a B2B or B2C product - timing is everything in life. The creation of this proprietary technology is funded by and built on top of the existing business models: our agency and IP studio.
The Platform: Community as a Moat
We like to say that A24 nailed ‘brand’, but Wonder’s going to build community.
There are two gating factors to our success: access to high quality talent and a deep understanding and ability to solve distribution. The Wonder App addresses both of these problems. You can sign up here.
Attracting the World’s Best Talent
The community now has 1,000 active members including some of the world’s best AI and hybrid creative talent. Our open-source jobs board is a fertile ground for scaling the agency as well as enabling other companies and individuals to find work and match → growing the ecosystem and building the rails for the AI creative industry is a multi-billion dollar problem we want to help solve.
Tech Partnerships & ARR
We’re not just solving a problem for Wonder but for the ecosystem and the tech companies that underpin it. In 2026 we’re going to pioneer ways for some of the world’s leading tech companies as well as Hollywood, to form authentic and grassroots connectivity with the AI-native creative industry - building value for each stakeholder in the ecosystem and creating a gravitational pull to the platform.
Launching a Film Festival
Fostering community and discovering the next generation of filmmaking talent go hand in hand. This year we launched the Wonder film festival, receiving over 300 incredible submissions and working with some world-class judges.
‘The Last Image’ - Frankie Caradonna | Winner of the Wonder Film Festival
Distribution
Defence wins championships, and distribution creates unicorns. This has never been as true as in 2026. One of the most fascinating developments of recent times is the rise of the podcast-first tier 1 VC - entrepreneurs parrying the value of their audience and network into raising capital and accessing world class deal flow. Distribution matters.
Youtube democratised distribution just as AI will lower the barriers to Hollywood creative. In a world of infinite content - distribution and the ability to grow and engage a loyal audience will be king. The Wonder community is an audience of loyal and mission driven creatives all unified in their desire to grasp and harness the new tools emerging for shaping worlds and telling stories.
In a world of infinite content - distribution and the ability to grow and engage a loyal audience will be King.
The Wonder film festival not only introduced us to a new cohort of talented and aspiring filmmakers, it also introduced them to an audience - a fan-base and a community that in time and via the platform could radically alter the way in which short films, micro-dramas and series get financed.
Starting the flywheel
We have some big bets in 2026 that I haven’t gone into here:
One is around the changing nature of content and meeting audiences where they are (micro-dramas on social platforms)
Others relate to some (world-first) projects and partners we can’t disclose but will change the landscape of AI and hybrid production in 2026.
But the key and main bet is that the foundations we laid in 2025 will pay dividends in 2026 and beyond as the flywheel begins to turn:
The New Wonder Flywheel
Original content will win agency work
Agency work will generate cash flow, train up new creatives & help us refine and develop our software (Story Engine)
Story Engine will allow us to create world-class content at scale especially episodic content - driving higher quality creative, better margins and greater retention
Our community platform will allow us to keep surfacing the best emerging talent and building an audience for their work and our own
Thank you for reading and following along with our journey.
It’s only just the beginning.
Xavier & Justin
