Welcome Wrapbook to the Equal Ventures Portfolio

By: Richard Kerby, Co-Founder & GP @ Equal Ventures

At Equal, we have been following the regulatory environment (particularly AB5 in California) regarding the treatment of W2, 1099, and project-based workers. While the long-term treatment of workers is still up in the air, we are certain that there will be increased legislation and scrutiny regarding how workers are treated and that the line between W2, 1099, and project-based workers will be clearer in the future. The entertainment industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that heavily relies on project-based workforces. There is over $22B spent on payroll in the entertainment industry across TV, Film, Commercial production, and Live Events, of which the vast majority is processed manually.

Wrapbook is a financial services platform for employers and their project-based workers. The company’s initial focus is on the entertainment industry. Given the project-based nature of the workforce in the entertainment industry; traditional payroll processors do not operate in this vertical. As a result, payroll processing within the entertainment industry has historically been a very manual and laborious process. A visual representation of the historical process can be seen below. Additionally, production companies in the entertainment vertical rely on their payroll processing providers for workers’ compensation insurance. Wrapbook is able to provide its customers with very competitive workers’ compensation rates thanks to its digital-first payroll processing platform.

Wrapbook provides a 10x better product experience by allowing production companies to hire and pay their project-based workers and insure them. Employers are able to populate all of their workers’ information, share job details with them, input wage rates, and outsource all other information collected on their workforce into the Wrapbook platform. Wrapbook is the first digital-first player in this space, but perhaps most importantly, it’s the first platform to embrace the worker, enabling them to create/own their own digital profile (prior jobs, union status, scheduling, etc.). We have seen similar successes with this business model (vertical payments/insurance-based business models) in other verticals such as in the oil & gas industry via RigUp. Much like RigUp, we believe that Wrapbook has the ability to collect information on which workers and workplaces demonstrate the greatest risk.

We led a $3.6M round in Wrapbook and were joined by Uncork Capital as well as the founder of Paylocity, Steve Sarowitz. Paylocity is a ~$7.5B cloud-based payroll processing business, and we are excited to also have Steve involved in the business given his domain expertise.

Feel free to go to https://www.wrapbook.com/ to find more information on the company!