Published : 2 weeks ago, on 26/11/2024

Top-tier investors back London startup transforming the future of creative work with AI-driven collaboration.

London, November: Workflow, a company building AI software for design, marketing, and product teams today announced it has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by early Revolut-investors, Venrex. Investors in the oversubscribed round included 8VC, backers of Asana, Form Ventures, Combination Ventures, Circle & Co, Tiny VC, Better Angle, Kima Ventures, and scout funds from Sequoia, Octopus, and Index Ventures. The round saw investors back exited founder Will Taylor (Rota.com).

Workflow is tackling a problem experienced by 40 million people who work with creative assets such as designs, videos, websites, and presentations where the bottleneck on a creative’s output is their team’s collaboration process.

At its heart a productivity tool, Workflow has developed a platform that combines collaboration and asset management, providing teams with a centralised space to manage tasks, digital assets, and perform review and approval. Capable of scanning creative work and using AI to provide feedback and highlight improvements to brand consistency, accessibility, design best practice, and spelling and grammar, Workflow also aims to improve quality of the work, providing the role of an intelligent partner for every creative. The product also brings in data from third party sources such as Nielsen to help its users improve conversion rates and reduce regulatory risk.

By integrating with popular design software such as Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud, Workflow aims to streamline each team’s process and save creatives hundreds of hours a month, giving them more time to focus on deep creative work.

“With the adoption of AI in creative tools, the amount of creative work is now growing by 30% 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?’, said Will Taylor, founder of Workflow.

“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 provides creatives with insights akin to accessing a panel of experts. We see the role of AI as enabling people’s creative processes, not replacing them”, he continued.

As the industry grapples with rapidly increasing volumes of digital assets, generative AI is also reducing the barrier to entry for “non-creatives” to do this type of work. More than 100 million other roles are increasingly finding creative asset production creeping into their job descriptions. The Workflow team is hoping that their software can help non-professionals as much as professional creatives.

“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 AI can support them”.

Having led the product, design and marketing teams at his previous company Rota, which sold to Broadlake private equity in 2022, Workflow founder Will Taylor saw first-hand how a lack of tooling meant that his creative teams were running much less efficiently than his engineering team.

“Automated testing and centralised review are now the de-facto norm for software development. 100% 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.”

“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 high-level ideas instead of correcting 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” he explains.

Workflow secured funding after its beta gained traction among brands, agencies, top UX/UI design schools and startups. The investment will be used to boost Workflow’s product development, particularly its AI-powered review system, aiming to help creative teams manage growing asset volumes.

“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. The team have built and exited companies before and have a vision that made this opportunity impossible to pass up”, said Alistair Russell, an investor at Venrex.

About Workflow

Workflow is a technology platform that speeds up the design, marketing, and creative review process. By leveraging AI and streamlined collaboration tools, Workflow aims to make marketing, creative and product teams more productive and efficient. The company is headquartered in London and serves a global client base of creative professionals, agencies, and brands.