workflow automation

Flowers Software helps SMBs manage their workflows • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Automation, Enterprise, Flowers Software, La Famiglia VC, smb, Startups, workflow automationNo Comments

Workflow automation may not be what gets you out of bed every morning, but it has long been a hot topic in the world of enterprise software. There are few businesses, after all, that don’t have dozens and dozens of repetitive workflows that are currently done manually that could be automated. Munich-based Flowers Software, which originally launched in 2019, is trying to put its own stamp on this field by offering a somewhat different approach from many of its competitors. The company today announced that it has raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC, with participation from LEA Partners and Collective Ventures. A number of angel investors also participated, including Personio’s co-founder Ignaz Forstmeier, SAP Hybris’ founder Carsten Thoma, SevDesk founders Fabian Silberer and Marco Reinbold, and Ironhack co-founder Gonzalo Manrique. Image Credits: Flowers Software Founded by Andreas Martin and Daniel Vöckler, who both spent time working at a number of small and medium businesses, Flowers currently focuses its marketing on two use cases: invoice approvals and general approvals. But the idea behind the tool is to offer a highly flexible no-code workflow tool to automate virtually any repetitive business process. “When we founded Flowers, we already knew that we were going to solve this major problem because of our experience from our previous jobs, the different industries and company sizes, etc.,” said Martin. “What we learned is that there are tons of tasks that go wrong in every company literally every day. […] And unfortunately, since most tasks are in recurring workflows, they go wrong repeatedly. For all of those problems, you will find one tool that solves exactly this problem. So you can have 1,000 problems and 1,001 tools solving them. But Daniel and I didn’t want to create another single-solution tool.” Flowers team photo. Image Credits: Flowers Software Martin noted that many traditional workflow automation tools focus on the backend, while Flowers provides anyone in the company with tools to build these workflows but also access to a user interface to step through these workflows from beginning to end. He noted that this also helps to make information more accessible and transparent to everyone inside a company. And while users can integrate a lot of third-party tools, for many of the current use cases, teams are doing a lot of their work in Flowers themselves. The team actually started building Flowers as a general-purpose automation tool but found that simply giving its users all of this freedom only led to confusion. So after some trial and error, Flowers decided to build out a few templates for common use cases — invoicing being one of those — and with that, the service took off. What the team needs to do now — and what Flowers will use at least some of the new funding for — is building out templates for more use cases so it can expand its user base. The team also plans to expand its marketing efforts to go beyond its current core market of most German-speaking countries to more of Europe and North America. Image Credits: Flowers Software “We’re going to launch with different use cases in different countries, or service work for use cases in every country, but some countries have more problems with contracts and approvals, or travel expenses,” Martin explained. “Our highly adaptable software makes it possible for us to support those laws, regulations and compliance rules very easily because the tool is flexible enough.” Flowers Software was already cashflow positive early on in its history, but the team decided to raise now in order to be able to grow faster and capture more of the market. “We really want to push as hard as we can and scale as hard as we can,” said Martin. “Flowers is changing the game for SMBs in business efficiency, productivity and profitability with a different approach to workflow creation and automation that is resonating with many customers across industries,” said Judith Dada, general partner at La Famiglia VC. “With Flowers, companies finally have a software that adapts to the way they work, rather than a software that requires the customer to change. We’re impressed by the product and strong sales traction that Andreas, Daniel and the team have already acquired and are excited to support them as they scale to new markets.”

After selling his last startup to Google, this founder now wants to automate mundane tasks with Relay • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Enterprise, gmail, Google, Jacob Bank, relay, Startups, workflow automationNo Comments

Some seven years after selling his previous company to Google, Jacob Bank is preparing to launch his next project, this time with a focus on automating mundane, repetitive tasks. Bank was previously cofounder and CEO at Timeful, a smart scheduling app that helped users make better use of their time through automatically prioritizing their various commitments. After selling up to Google in 2015, Bank joined Google’s ranks and set about integrating core Timeful technology into Gmail and Google Calendar, before transitioning into various roles at the tech giant — including product lead for Gmail, Calendar, Google Chat, and Google Workspace. Fast-forward to July 2021, and Bank parted ways with Google to found Relay, which has a self-stated mission to “tackle collaborative workflows” with a product that sits somewhere at the intersection of Zapier and Asana. He also said that he’s managed to hire a number of product, design, and engineering personnel from the Gmail and Google Calendar development team. “From a product perspective, we aim to combine the time saving automations of Zapier with the accountability of Asana, but optimized for repeated workflows,” Bank explained to ZebethMedia. Relay: Automations Image Credits: Relay Automation for the people There are certainly no shortage of workflow automation tools out there, Zapier perhaps chief among them, while newcomers such as Bardeen have also been attracting the attentions of venture capitalists. And it’s this desire to reduce tedious, repetitive tasks that Relay is looking to capitalize on too, with specific scenarios in mind — use-cases that are less about “automated mechanical data flows from one product to another,” as Bank puts it, and more about supporting collaborative activities that may require multiple people to work together. For example, anything that recurs or repeats across the business sphere, such as all-hands meetings, investor updates, board meetings, newsletters, planning cycles, and so on, are within Relay’s scope. As are “function-specific playbooks” such as new-hire onboarding, customer onboarding, or feature launches. It’s basically aimed at reducing time-consuming admin from various business functions, from COO to product management and customer success. Relay sits on top of existing productivity tools such as calendars and team collaboration software, and reduces much of the manual labor involved in organizing a specific event or activity. For example, a monthly all-hands meeting may involve several contributors from different departments, each charged with preparing their own updates — with Relay, companies can preconfigure a lot of the administrative steps such as messaging contributors a few days before the all-hands with the correct presentation template, who are then prompted to add their content, and then automatically create a dedicated Slack channel for that specific meeting. Relay: Workflow automation in action Image Credits: Relay Using these various productivity tools separately in their own silos, if the all-hands meeting date has to be pushed back a few days at the last minute, this would ordinarily require organizers or management to manually update dates and schedules in Asana, for example. With Relay, any change is reflected up and down the chain. “Maybe the most consequential difference between our product and what’s out there is that we’re going after a class of use-cases that haven’t been explicitly served before,” Bank said. “The operating workflows required to run a great team: all-hands, leads meetings, executive updates, product reviews, business reviews, newsletters, planning processes, onboarding, project tracking, feature launches, customer updates, and much more.” Ramping up For now, Relay remains a closed early-access product, with plans to transition into an open beta phase before the end of the year. While it’s keeping most of its early users under wraps for now, it did confirm Ramp and Lumos as “design partners” as it readies for a wider rollout. “We’re targeting organizations that are between 30 and 500 [workers] in size, and most of our early design partners are tech companies,” Bank said. To help take things to the next level, Relay has also announced it has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, which also invested in Timeful back in 2014, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, SV Angel, and a handful of angels. “Relay’s vision of understanding the best practices of top-performing teams and creating assistive software to bring those workflows to everyone could transform the entire way people work,” Khosla Ventures’ partner Sandhya Venkatachalam said in a statement. “In Jacob, we have a founder that we have backed before, with a team that has the track record, conviction and talent to execute on this incredibly daunting challenge.”