Xavier Collins

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. Now, he leads Wonder's operations, strategy, and commercial partnerships.

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, clerked at Freehills, and reached the final round of the BCG scholarship before choosing the startup path. He co-founded Nexus Notes (a peer-to-peer learning marketplace, top 10 ed-tech in Asia-Pacific, Startmate Alumni 2014) after an early internship at Uber during its Sydney launch.

He joined Deliveroo as one of the first 30 people, signing up restaurants carrying backpacks and tablets and meeting riders in person to hand them kit and show them the app. He rose to Head of Deliveroo for Business & UK Market Launches with full P&L responsibility over the company's biggest vertical, managing over 6,000 riders and more than 10,000 orders a day.

He then joined Turo as Managing Director UK to launch the car-sharing platform from scratch. He eventually became Vice President UK over six and a half years, helping to grow the business from zero to $60 million in revenue.

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.

The portfolio includes specific commercial action titles: Arcadian with Nicolas Cage, and Armor with Sylvester Stallone.

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. The studio was revenue-generating within its first six months.

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"

Perspective

Xavier thinks about the creative industry through the lens of a marketplace operator.

Access to talent is the competitive advantage - "one of the gating factors to success in this space is going to be access to talent" - and AI is compressing the cost of Hollywood-grade production the same way previous technology shifts compressed distribution.

"It's just so obvious when you have product-market fit."

Xavier also advises companies on marketplace scaling (Halter, TripWip, Invisible Technologies), runs The Shaman List - a newsletter connecting investors with startups that has helped companies raise over $10 million - and is an angel investor in seed to Series A companies including Percent, Yonder, Passionfruit, and Days Brewing.