Xavier Collins, Co-founder & CEO at Wonder Studios

Xavier Collins is the co-founder and CEO of Wonder Studios, an AI-native film studio rethinking how stories get made, funded, and distributed. Before Wonder, he spent a decade launching and scaling marketplace companies like Uber, Turo and Deliveroo.

Before Wonder

Xavier was born in London, lived in France from age seven, then moved to New Zealand at twelve. He studied law at Sydney University, where he co-founded Nexus Notes, a peer-to-peer learning marketplace.

Xavier joined Deliveroo as one of the first 30 people, growing the UK as a general manager before leaving to launch Turo in Europe where he became Vice President helping to grow the business from zero to $60 million in revenue a year.

Lumiere Ventures and the entertainment thesis

In 2023, Xavier co-founded Lumiere Ventures with Richard Lechartier, a film industry veteran with over 20 years' experience. Lumiere acquires film IP from Hollywood producers and sub-licenses to platforms like Amazon and Netflix across the UK, France, and Australia. The portfolio includes commercial action titles led by talent like Sylvester Stallone and Nicolas Cage. Building Lumiere showed Xavier how film rights, distribution, and production economics actually work, and how inefficient most of it is. He saw that AI was about to do for film production what YouTube had done for distribution: make it accessible to individual creators at a cost traditional studios could not match. That's what led him to Wonder.

Founding Wonder Studios

Xavier co-founded Wonder Studios with Justin Hackney in January 2025. Over rosé at the Cannes Film Festival, Justin showed him an AI trailer he'd made for Alice in Wonderland. Xavier sent it to the CEO of a production company he'd worked with through Lumiere, and they came back the same day wanting to use the technology. Wonder had its first customer before it was even incorporated.

Xavier led Wonder's fundraising: a $3.25M+ pre-seed backed by Blackbird and LocalGlobe, followed by a $12 million seed round led by Atomico in October 2025 with participation from LocalGlobe, Adobe Ventures, and Upside Ventures (Sidemen). Angel investors include Erik Huggers, Stephen Lambert, Nigel Morris, the Freepik CEO, and executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and ElevenLabs.

Wonder has partnered with Google DeepMind, YouTube, Universal Music Group, ElevenLabs, Freepik, Fal, and Kling AI. Projects include the Beyond the Loop anthology series, a music video for Lewis Capaldi's "Something in the Heavens", a documentary with Campfire Studios, and brand campaigns for commercial clients.

Speaking and public appearances

Xavier has appeared on podcasts and panels covering how Wonder operates:

• VP Land podcast - on building Wonder as "the A24 of cinema" and community-led talent strategy

• Scaling Europe podcast - on the $12M raise, what AI-native means, and why creators are Wonder's primary bet

• Wildhearts x Blackbird podcast - on product-market fit and the early days of building Wonder

• FAL Generative Media Conference - panel on AI-native production pipelines

• Day One FM / Diaspora podcast (April 2025) - on the founding moment at Cannes, marketplace hustle from Nexus Notes to Turo, film finance economics, and why AI is "the new internet"