Wrapbook is a company that streamlines the process of paying for film, television as well as commercial projects, raked in the sum of $27million in Series A capital from notable names in the entertainment and tech worlds.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation by Equal Ventures and Uncork Capital and also from WndrCo (the holding and investment company headed by DreamWorks and Quibi co-founder/founder Jeffrey Katzenberg) and from CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz.
“It’s time we bring production financial services into the 21st century,” Katzenberg stated in an announcement. “We need a technology solution that will address the increasing complexities of production onboarding, pay and insuring cast and crew, only exacerbated by COVID-19, and I believe that Wrapbook delivers.”
Wrapbook’s co-founder and CEO Ali Javid explained that entertainment payroll has remained an paper-based, old-fashioned process which can be difficult to track when cast and crew members move from project to project as much as 30 times in a the course of a single year. Wrapbook streamlines and digitizes the process by electronically gathering all documents and signatures required for the start of production, managing payroll, and creating a dashboard that tracks the payments, and making it easier to obtain the insurance needed.
Wrapbook founders Cameron Woodward, Ali Javid, Hesham El-Nahhas and Naysawn Naji
The company was established in 2018 Javid informed me that demand has risen dramatically since production resumed following the pandemic, and COVID-19 “totally” changing the industry’s environment and prompting producers to ask, “Hey, if there’s an easier, faster way to do this from my house, then yeah let’s look at it.”
Javid also spoke of his Wrapbook platform as “a vertical fintech solution that’s growing really fast in an industry that we understand really well and not many others have thought about.” In actuality, he stated that the company’s revenue increased 7x by 2020.
While Wrapbook’s primary customers are production companies, the co-founder and chief marketing officer Cameron Woodward (who previously worked in the fields of filmmaking insurance, commercial production) explained that the team is also concentrated on providing a positive experience for the actors and crew members who are paid via the platformand a rising number of them (12 percent so far) have utilized the Wrapbook profiles to receive payments for many productions.
The company had previously had $3.6 million of seed money. In the future, Javid and Woodward said Wrapbook’s technology could one day be incorporated into other industries that depend on projects. However, for the moment they believe there is lots of opportunities to continue growth in entertainment only -they estimate that the industry has a potential of $200 billion in annual revenue.
“We’re going to double down on what’s working and build things out based on what customers have asked for within entertainment,” Javid added. “To that end, we’re working towards hiring 100 people in the next 12 months.”