Mysterious stealth gaming startup Wonder announces $14 million in funding

Ah, another day, another stealth mobile gaming startup getting funded by Shakira.

LA-based Wonder announced today that it has closed a Series A round of funding led by Grishin Robotics and TCL Communication Holdings Ltd.; Wonder announced they had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding in July of last year, but we now know that they have raised about $14 million in funding to date.

The startup is building what it claims to be a new breed of “VR-ready” gaming hardware in secret, but seems to have been gesturing loudly about just how secret it is.

The stealthy group boasts a fairly eccentric group of investors, including Kevin Spacey, a couple of football players and, yes, Shakira. The team is notably also backed by Joe Lonsdale’s reincarnated 8VC and Greycroft Partners.

Wonder has maintained a certain level of do-they-even-know-what-they’re-doing mystery since they began talking abut their ambitions publicly. Other than its backers, we still don’t really know a ton about the startup creating phone/gaming hardware in its Abbot Kinney offices not far from Snap. The team is largely a smattering of people from CEO Andy Kleinman’s last startup, a mobile apps company called MobLabs.

Wonder is building what it calls a “new type of portable hardware device that might be considered a hybrid between a powerful smartphone and a gaming console.” Whether the device is more Nintendo Switch or Nokia N-Gage is anyone’s guess, but the company is looking to stock the device with exclusive software and services optimized for the device and will be optimizing the device for virtual reality usage.

The startup is keeping wraps on what it has been up to, but claims that more product details are on the way soon.