UK’s Workflow, founded by ex-Instagram and Yelp team members, raise €2.8M in pre-seed funding

London-based Workflow, an AI software company for design, marketing, and product teams, has secured $3M (approximately €2.84M) in pre-seed funding. 

The oversubscribed round was led by Venrex, early investors in Revolut, with participation from 8VC, Sequoia scouts, Octopus, and Index Ventures. 

The round also attracted backing from investors supporting exited founders Will Taylor (Rota.com), Allis Yao (ex-Instagram, Spirito AI), and Paul Sangle (Mailwiz.app, ex-Yelp product lead).

Alistair Russell, an investor at Venrex, says, “With Workflow, we saw an opportunity to invest in the future of creative work and in the near term address issues we consistently see appearing in some of the world’s largest brands and our portfolio companies.”

“Workflow’s narrow focus on this sector and the increasing demand for creative output, which is expected to increase 4.5 times by 2030, meant we couldn’t wait to back the experienced team at Workflow. These founders have built and exited companies before, and have a vision that made this opportunity impossible to pass up.”

Collaboration software for creative projects

Workflow has launched a platform designed to streamline collaboration for creative teams working with assets like designs, videos, and presentations. Addressing workflow bottlenecks, the platform centralises task management, asset organisation, and the review and approval process.

Leveraging AI, Workflow provides feedback on brand consistency, accessibility, design standards, and accuracy, functioning as an “intelligent” partner for every creative. Integrations with design tools such as Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud allow the platform to fit into existing workflows.

Additionally, third-party data from sources like Nielsen helps users optimise conversion rates and manage regulatory risks. Serving a global clientele, Workflow aims to boost productivity for teams in design, marketing, and product development.

Capital utilisation

Workflow secured funding after its beta attracted brands, agencies, design schools, and startups. The funds will support product development, especially its AI review system, to help creative teams manage more assets efficiently.

Will Taylor, Workflow founder who previously led product, design, and marketing at Rota (sold to Broadlake in 2022), witnessed firsthand how limited tools hindered his creative teams’ efficiency compared to engineering.

Taylor says, “With the adoption of AI in creative tools, the amount of creative work is now growing by 30 per cent a year. For example last year, more photographs were generated than have ever been taken by human photographers. So we’ve been asking ourselves ‘what infrastructure is going to be needed to manage this volume of work?”

“One problem that doesn’t scale well is issue checking – there’s no Grammarly for creative work and to date, this tedious work is still done by eye. Beyond issue checking, we believe AI can even provide insight to creatives analogous to access to a panel of experts. We see the role of AI as enabling people’s creative processes, not replacing them,” adds Taylor.

Bridging the gap between professionals and non-creatives

According to Workflow, as generative AI lowers the barrier to creative tasks, over 100 million non-creatives are increasingly tasked with producing digital assets. 

Workflow, designed to streamline collaboration and provide AI-driven feedback, seeks to assist both professional creatives and non-professionals, making creative production more accessible and efficient for a broader range of users.

Paul Sangle, co-founder and CPO of Workflow, says, “To develop our AI reviewer, we spent a lot of time with creatives to map out where in the review process they are getting slowed down. We saw Dyslexic and non-native English creatives turn on the spelling and grammar checkers, Junior designers and UX schools want access to design best practices.”

“Marketers in regulated industries are interested in legislative checks – an area they say they struggle to memorise, and where legal review can take days to materialise. Every person has different areas in their professional work where they can find a partner in AI to support.”

Allis Yao, co-founder and CTO at Workflow (previously at Instagram), adds, “Automated testing and centralised review are now the de-facto norm for software development. 100 per cent of the industry uses them.”

“By comparison, the process for creatives is decades behind. Our goal is to make creatives faster. We want to elevate their work away from the smaller issues so that they can focus on meaningful creative work.”

Yao says, “Because of the way we leverage AI, we’re able to automate routine tasks such as correcting hard-to-spot inaccuracies – and this both saves a lot of time in initial feedback cycles and helps teams get along smoothly, as they only need to discuss the high-level ideas instead of correct each other’s typos.”

“We’ll soon make it possible for creatives to do things like review their work against regulatory compliance and ensure it follows advertising standards for the industry – this is information the designer wouldn’t traditionally know.”