Woflow rallies $3.5m seed

Woflow, a data infrastructure company, has secured $3.5 million in seed funding. David Sacks at Craft Ventures led the round with participation from other investors that included Base10 Partners, Flex Capital and Garuda Ventures.

PRESS RELEASE

February 22, 2021, San Francisco, CA – Woflow, the data infrastructure company behind some of the highest growth online ordering and food delivery platforms, today announced it has raised $3.5M in seed funding to launch the world’s first Merchant Data Platform. The round was led by David Sacks at Craft Ventures with participation from Base10 Partners and Flex Capital, joining existing pre-seed investor Garuda Ventures. Companies including DoorDash, Snackpass, and Chowly already use Woflow to onboard and maintain merchant data on their platforms – structuring menus and visual assets, and facilitating transactions for their users.

The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation for a number of industries, including restaurants and local businesses. This has led to the fast growth of the online ordering and food delivery ecosystems, which has, in turn, accelerated demand for Woflow’s Merchant Data Platform — the data infrastructure that powers merchant data and operations. As new partners seek to streamline and automate their merchant data processes, Woflow has begun to expand the use cases of the platform and is seeing platform revenue doubling month over month.

“We interact with digital menus all the time when ordering food, so it’s easy to overlook the enormous complexity of getting unstructured data from restaurants into this user-friendly format. Once we understood what a pain point wrangling this data is, investing in Woflow was an easy decision” said David Sacks, General Partner at Craft Ventures. “The market opportunity is enormous: eCommerce, retail, and logistics marketplaces all have this same unstructured data problem, and we believe Woflow will be the team to solve it.”

Without Woflow, platforms and marketplaces are saddled with a complex web of manual processes, vendors and vendor management to keep their merchant data up-to-date. This results in high operational costs and inconsistent quality, which reflects poorly on local businesses. Woflow’s Merchant Data Platform is the data infrastructure that solves this by structuring and maintaining this information automatically – helping food delivery, last-mile delivery, retail, and eCommerce companies deliver a positive customer experience and sustained growth.

“As Snackpass continues through a period of enormous growth across many new markets, Woflow’s Merchant Data Platform solved one of our biggest bottlenecks — onboarding merchant data — and turned it into a delightful step.” said Kevin Tan, CEO of Snackpass.
Merchant Data Platform

Working closely with many of the food tech industry’s leading platforms, Woflow developed the world’s first Merchant Data Platform, which offers a standardized, automated approach to merchant data operations. The Woflow Platform already powers thousands of interactions a day, through a simple API.

How It Works:
Job submission: Customer jobs are submitted via the platform or automatically via API such as the Salesforce integration.
Queuing and dispatching: The ML-powered task automation system transforms complex jobs into smaller trainable tasks.
Consensus: Multiple instances of tasks are completed by ML models and workforce users ensuring quality using an automated consensus system.
Conflict resolution: Any lower confidence conflicts that arise are reviewed and resolved by a higher-level member of the distributed workforce.
Job completion: Results are compiled into structured data including any customer-specific programmatic output requirements. Results are returned via API.

“Woflow’s Merchant Data Platform is going to be a critical piece to automating data management for several sizable industries,” said TJ Nahigian, General Partner at Base10 Partners. “We’re confident Woflow’s solution will enable a variety of businesses to take control of these previously manual processes at scale and we’re excited to be partnering with them.”

About Woflow
Woflow was created to make data usable, by structuring the world’s unstructured data. Woflow is a leader in catalog digitization and data management providing the world’s first Merchant Data Platform. Woflow helps industry-defining platforms and marketplaces create and maintain complex structured merchant data at scale. Woflow was founded in 2017 by Jordan Nemrow (CEO) and Will Bewley (COO) and is based in San Francisco, CA. For more information please visit: https://www.woflow.com