Automated design software Workflow secures $3M

Workflow, a provider of software for design, marketing, and product teams has raised $3M in pre-seed funding in a round led by early Revolut-investors. Investors also included 8VC, backers of Asana, and scout funds from Sequoia, Octopus, and Index Ventures.

Workflow helps to facilitate collabration on creative assets such as designs, videos, websites, and presentations. Its platform provides 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.

It has integrated with popular design software such as Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud, “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, co-founder.

“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 providing 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.” he continued.

“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.” added Paul Sangle, co-founder and CPO.

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. These founders 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.