London-based Workflow, a company developing AI software for design, marketing, and product teams, has secured $3 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Venrex, early investors in Revolut, with participation from 8VC, backers of Asana, and scout funds from Sequoia, Octopus, and Index Ventures.
Workflow secured funding after its beta gained traction among brands, agencies, top UX/UI design schools, and startups. The investment will boost Workflow’s development, particularly its AI-powered review system, which aims to help creative teams manage growing asset volumes.
The bottleneck: creative output is the team’s collaboration process
Workflow was founded in 2023 by a team including Allis Yao, an ex-Meta engineer with AI expertise, Paul Sanglé-Ferrière, a second-time founder and former Yelp product manager with experience in generative AI, and Will Taylor, a co-founder of Rota. The company aims to streamline the feedback process, making it more efficient for teams to produce high-quality work using AI-driven insights. This addresses a problem faced by the estimated 40 million people who work with creative assets like designs, videos, websites, and presentations.
Workflow is a platform that combines collaboration and asset management tools. It gives teams a centralised space to manage tasks, digital assets, and review/approval workflows. Integrating with popular design software like Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud, Workflow streamlines each team’s process. In fact, it saves creatives hundreds of hours monthly, allowing them to focus on deep creative work.
Furthermore, Workflow’s capabilities can scan creative work to provide feedback and highlight improvements related to brand consistency, accessibility, design best practices, and grammar/spelling. The platform also incorporates data from third-party sources to help users improve conversion rates and reduce regulatory risk, acting as an “intelligent” partner for creatives.
Workflow challenges Silicon Valley’s obValley’swith single-purpose tools
Speaking to TFN, Will Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Workflow, explained how the technology works in real life: “Workflow addresses the mess created by Silicon Valley’s obsession with single-purpose tools.” He noted that most teams currently use a patchwork of tools for tasks, creative feedback, storage, and asset review, often spanning 5-6 different applications.
Today, some creatives use Workflow as a standalone tool. Other teams replace whatever a creative team uses to share and present work for feedback (such as Miro boards, website links, or “client-rea” y” Figma pag” s), whereas some teams replace their task manager (such as ClickUp, Monday, or Trello).
Workflow’s features can review work for issues like grammar, typos, accessibility, and UX concerns, providing valuable insights to help creatives improve their output. “For other pieces, we use a set of LLMs to review, which may also be augmented via RAG from our data sets or 3rd parties. For example, UX review. This might comment that your lines of text are too long to be easily readable or you have “widows and “orphans” (extra wo “ds hanging off the end of text),” concluded Taylor in a conversation with TFN.
A new era of creative work where AI augments human creativity
As the industry grapples with rapidly increasing volumes of digital assets, generative AI also lowers the barrier for “non-creatives to produce” creative work. Over 100 million roles now involve creative asset production, and Workflow supports both professional creatives and non-professional creators.
Co-founder Allis Yao notes that the creative process needs to catch up while automated testing and centralised review are standard in software development. Workflow aims to ‘make creatives faster’ by automating routine tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-level, meaningful creative work, liberating them from mundane tasks, and empowering them to unleash their full creative potential.
The company sees AI’s role as assisting creatives rather than replacing them. The AI-driven features are designed to reduce distractions and “busywork” so that creatives can focus on their craft while providing smart suggestions and best practice guidance to inspire and elevate their work.
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