Today Wing announces Wing Four, our new $600 million pool of capital dedicated to early-stage investing and long-term company building in B2B technology.
It is almost 10 years to the day since we officially launched Wing and Wing One, our first institutional fund. Gaurav and I founded Wing to address a dire need: a venture capital firm that would engage deeply with founders, build strong foundations at the earliest stages, and then be their most valuable partner long term. Working at two seminal firms – I was 15 years at Accel, Gaurav 10 years at Sequoia – revealed the need, and also taught us what it takes to build companies that matter. We had helped more than 20 companies take that difficult but exhilarating journey from nascent concept to IPO, and we wanted to build a pure-play venture firm devoted to that mission.
Wing has come a long way in the past decade. Today there are seven experienced investment partners at the firm: Sara Choi, Zach DeWitt, Jake Flomenberg, Tanay Jaipuria and Chris Zeoli, in addition to Gaurav and me. The team is now the largest and highest caliber concentration of venture talent in early-stage B2B technology, and is complemented by our Founder Success Team, which delivers difference-making outcomes in key company-building disciplines: Rajeev Chand leads our Research team; Sunil Chokshi, our Talent Network; Kayleigh Karutis, our Marketing and Media programs; and Sam Parker, our Market Development initiatives.
We’ve made over 100 investments, some of which are already household names (if you are a B2B tech household) like Snowflake, Shape Security, Cohesity and Gong; and others that are bursting on the scene as I write this, like Pinecone, Path, Copy.ai and Medely. The sum of all these parts is a unique venture firm dedicated to empowering people – first and foremost our founders, and also their customers – to “Do your best work.”
Wing has always been a thesis-driven firm, and today we articulate that thesis as the “AI-first transformation of business” (which you can read more about here). The AI-first thesis is a direct outgrowth of our founding observation of the “DMC Shift”, which postulated that the combined action of three independently powerful forces – Data, Mobility, and the Cloud – would collectively drive a new paradigm in B2B technology.
This turned out to be even more true than we imagined; DMC drove the digital transformation super-cycle that has dominated the past decade. The data revolution, combined with cloud computing, set the table for AI to be applied in B2B use cases as never before, and burst the dam for what we believe to be the next and most powerful super-cycle we will see in our careers: the AI-first transformation of business. Enabling this transformation is a new technology stack consisting of AI-centric data platforms, powerful AI processing and tooling, and an array of increasingly autonomous applications that apply the outputs of AI to drive key business outcomes. Wing invests in companies building at all layers of the AI-first stack, as well as those using it in novel ways to disrupt major industries.
This AI-first transformation will touch every part of our lives, but we believe it will be uniquely powerful in the life science and healthcare industries. AI has the potential to revolutionize the way biotech and pharmaceutical companies do research and development (e.g Cartography, Vevo) —and healthcare service delivery can be vastly improved with data-driven approaches (e.g. Medeley, Path). Wing pursues a specific vertical instantiation of our general AI-first thesis in these domains, which we think are rich with opportunity.
We have been investing in AI since the formation of the firm a decade ago. When we invested in Snowflake’s seed round in early 2013, the company was not nearly as AI-centric as it is today, but it opened our eyes to the power of the combined action of business data and the cloud – the critical precursors to practical AI in B2B. By 2014 and 2015 we were already investing in application companies seeking to leverage early forms of AI to drive business outcomes. Some of these were probably too early, such as our AI-powered customer support agent (Qlue, 2015), or our computervision-based visual inspection system (Cogniac, 2015). But we persisted, and published our thesis on the coming generation of “Data-first” business applications (as we called them at that time) in early 2016.
Things really came into place in early 2017, when I first met Amit Bendov of Gong. Gong filled in the blanks in our thesis, and showed us what the future would look like across a broad range of business application categories. This led to a chain of investments in what we today call “autonomous applications,” including Jellyfish in engineering (2018), Findem in recruiting (2019), Copy.ai in content for marketing (2021) and a host of others. We were also busy in the lower layers of the AI-first stack, helping build companies like Pinecone (2020), Truera (2019) and Sima (2019). By the time ChatGPT hit the stage, Wing was already helping to lead what would become the AI-first wave.
Wing Four will be perhaps the most significant pool of early-stage capital and company-building resources dedicated to enabling the AI-first transformation of business. “Do your best work” has become Wing’s mantra, an exhortation which applies both to the founders we partner with and the customers they enable with groundbreaking new products. We look forward to working with talented entrepreneurs that share our vision of a business world fully empowered by AI.
