Wing Venture Capital announced today that it has raised Wing Three, a USD450 million pool of capital dedicated to early stage investing and long-term company-building in enterprise technology. Like the firm’s predecessor funds, Wing Three has the backing of the venture world’s most sophisticated institutional investors. In a sign of the times, Wing Three was raised virtually with nearly all investor discussions occurring via video during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
Wing Three will be invested to help founders build businesses that enable the “Modern Enterprise,” which is an agile workplace built on data and powered by AI. The firm invests early, leading Seed and Series A financings, and partners for the long term with its signature company-building skills and resources.
Wing has one of the deepest and most experienced teams in the enterprise technology sector and has been aggressively augmenting its talent across the board. In the past two years, Sara Choi (formerly of Google), Jake Flomenberg (formerly of Accel) and Aaref Hilaly (formerly of Sequoia) have joined Zach DeWitt, Gaurav Garg and Peter Wagner as investing partners. During the same period, operating partners Rajeev Chand (Head of Research, formerly of Rutberg), Sunil Chokshi (Head of Talent, formerly of A16Z) and Didi Dayton (Head of Market Development, formerly of FireEye) have joined to lead key portfolio service initiatives designed to accelerate the progress of early stage enterprise technology companies.
Unlike the rest of the venture industry, Wing has seen its investment pace accelerate since the pandemic lockdown and is already closing the first few investments from the new fund. The Wing team has operated in challenging environments before: three of Wing’s six investing partners were active venture capitalists or company founders during both the Dot-Com Crash of 2000 and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. “Times like these are when many of the best companies are formed,” said Peter Wagner, a Founding Partner of Wing. “Founders of true grit step forward to build companies in a less cluttered market with a keen focus on execution. We look forward to supporting entrepreneurs of this caliber and character with the resources of Wing Three.”
The partners of Wing have delivered a string of notable exits in recent years, including 6 substantial acquisitions in the past fifteen months: Shape Security (F5), ThousandEyes (Cisco), Demisto (Palo Alto Networks), BlueJeans Network (Verizon), Cumulus Networks (Nvidia) and Aporeto (Palo Alto Networks). Across their venture careers, the Wing team has worked as early, lead investors in twenty-one enterprise technology companies that have gone public or realised billion-dollar exits, including eighteen IPO’s and three billion-dollar-plus acquisitions. Additional widely recognised private companies in the current Wing portfolio include Snowflake, Cohesity and Gong. “With every investment we make, we aim to help build an enduring company that can create its category and change the technology landscape,” said Gaurav Garg, a Founding Partner of Wing. “Wing’s reason for existence is to be the best possible partner to founders of similar ambition.”
