Wrapbook, a startup that automates the payroll process for TV, movies, and commercial productions, has raised $27M in Series A funding from prominent figures in both the tech and entertainment industries.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which included Equal Ventures and Uncork Capital, WndrCo (the investment and holding firm led by DreamWorks and Quibi founder/cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg) and CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz.

What is Wrapbook?

Wrapbook is a payroll solution that assists entertainment businesses in hiring and managing employees, vendors, and contractors following industry regulations. It enables team members to create personalised profiles that include their names, contact information, images, projects, timecards, and preferred payment methods.

Wrapbook allows supervisors to capture electronic signatures on generated onboarding paperwork and imported contracts like NDAs, production agreements, and Wage Threat Prevention Act. Managers can use it to automatically generate tax filings and set up union payments for SAG-AFTRA, DGA, WGA, and AEA. Administrators can view expenses, configure permission rights, handle payment approvals, receive custom notifications, and maintain a crew database on a centralised platform using the built-in management tools.

Wrapbook enables companies to integrate the platform with a variety of third-party solutions. Pricing is determine by the number of wages pay, and support is provide through FAQs, documentation, email, and other online channels.

Wrapbook Funding

Wrapbook debuted last year amid the COVID epidemic, attracting clients for various TV, film, digital, and commercial productions. According to the company, approximately 12% of its platform workers have reused their profile in at least one other manufacturer (e.g., they were pay by 2 or more employers via Wrapbook).

Wrapbook cofounder and CEO Ali Javid previously worked at Intel. They were the VP of business development at Build Labs, a startup that developed AI-based 3D body-scanning software that Amazon acquired. “With this incredible group of tech and entertainment leaders, we will transform the industry with production-ready software.

Wrapbook “takes a fresh method to the complex problem of efficiently paying project-based workers,” said Kristina Shen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We are impressed by the management team’s breadth of experience and tremendous early momentum.”

Wrapbook (wrapbook 27m seriestechcrunch) was founded by Javid, chief marketing officer Cameron Woodward, chief technology officer Hesham El-Nahhas, and chief product officer Naysawn Naji. The company is headquarter in New York, with additional offices in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Wrapbook Series A

“It’s past time to bring production finance into the twenty-first century,” Katzenberg said. “We need a technology solution that will address the increasing complexities of production onboarding, pay, and ensuring cast and crew, which COVID-19 only exacerbates, and I believe Wrapbook delivers,” says a Wrapbook executive.

Wrapbook (wrapbook 27m seriestechcrunch) cofounder and CEO Ali Javid explained that entertainment payroll has primarily remained a paper-based process, which can be especially difficult to track as cast and crew move from project to project up to 30 times per year. Wrapbook digitises and simplifies the process by electronically collecting all forms and signatures required at the start of production, handling payroll, creating a dashboard to track payments, and making it simple to obtain the required insurance.

Who is a16z?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm found by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in 2009. Menlo Park, California, is the company’s headquarters.

Andreessen Horowitz invests in early-stage startups as well as established growth companies. Its investments span the industries of mobile, cryptocurrency, gaming, social, e-commerce, education, and enterprise IT (including cloud computing, security, and software as a service).

Wrapbook 27m series TechCrunch

Even though the startup was founded in 2018, Javid told me that demand has risen dramatically as production resumed during the pandemic, with COVID-19 “completely” changing the industry’s culture and prompting production companies to say.

Wrapbook, according to Javid, is a “vertical fintech solution that’s growing fast in an industry that we understand well and that not many others have thought about.” He predicted that the company’s revenue would increase sevenfold by 2020.

Previously, the startup received $3.6 million in seed funding. Wrapbook’s solution, according to Javid and Woodward, could eventually be adopt in other project-bas industries. But, for the time being, they see plenty of room to expand within the entertainment industry alone — they estimate that the industry currently receives $200 billion in annual payments.

“We’re going to double down on what’s working and expand on what customers have requested in terms of entertainment,” Javid said. “To that end, we aim to hire 100 people over the next 12 months.”

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