Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, Wing has recently closed its third fund by raising $450mmn in capital. The entire fund was raised virtually and is substantially bigger than its second fund which raised $300mn in funds.
The venture capital firm was formed in 2013 by veteran venture capitalists Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg. Wagner previously spent more than 14 years as a partner with Accel, while Garg was a partner with Sequoia Capital for roughly a dozen years.
The co-founders have slowly expanded their team and brought in many younger partners. Former CEO and co-founder of Drop Inc, Zach Dewitt joined Wing in 2017 and recently the company got onboard Sara Choi, formerly of Google; Jake Flomenberg, formerly of Accel; and Aaref Hilaly, formerly of Sequoia.
The company says it focuses on startups which enable the “modern enterprise”. Their core area of investment has been workplaces built on data and powered by AI. This thing works for the VC firm as now due to the pandemic companies are quickly shifting to remote work and cloud-based services.
The VC firm has already seen three of its portfolio companies acquired, including Aporeto’s $150 million sale to Palo Alto Networks last November, Shape Security’s December acquisition by F5 Networks for $1 billion, and sale of Cumulus Networks to Nvidia just last month, for undisclosed terms.
Most recently, Wing-backed speech tech startup Deepgram has picked up an undisclosed strategic investment from In-Q-Tel (IQT), the venture capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community. In-Q-Tel and its government partners will now start testing Deepgram’s speech recognition and transcription technology.
Another fruitful investment of Wing includes Snowflake Computing. The VC firm is a seed investor in the data-warehousing company and has participated in every round of the company since.
Snowflake is currently valued at over $12.4bn at the time of its last financing round in February. The investment is soon expected to bear results for the VC firm as Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman has suggested the company’s next fundraising event will be a public one.
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