At Construct, there’s nothing we love more than companies bringing transformational technology to the most foundational sectors of our economy. But these segments often don’t change overnight. The most successful companies meet an industry where they are at the moment, and help to usher them into the future, leveling up their technology in a way that feels authentic and achievable while setting the stage for meaningful transformation. These solutions typically solve the challenges at the bottom rung first: the enabling technology that’s necessary for anything and everything else to work.
COVID has been a meaningful change accelerator across the “real economy” over the last two years. In the case of restaurants, they were flung into the digital age nearly overnight with online ordering, contactless pickup, QR code mania and more, without some of the most basic building blocks in place. When we met Jordan and Will of Woflow, it was clear they deeply understood this nuance and were building a technical solution that would start with the basics with a vision to build something much, much bigger.
As Rachel knows well from her days at Uber, something as seemingly simple as having a restaurant’s menu information available in a delivery app is complicated and expensive, especially when you’re doing it hundreds of thousands of times a month and in 30+ languages. It requires thousands of support agent hours in BPOs around the world performing highly manual data entry, not to mention, the tens of millions of dollars a year in refunds given if the item description contains even the most minor errors.
Woflow starts here, digitizing and task-automating menu information. The Woflow platform leverages machine learning to intake a vast array of disparate data and output clean, highly formatted, and rich product data that can be seamlessly requested via API by all of a restaurant's technology partners. Woflow’s technology automates and augments human workflows saving customer support teams 15 thousand FTE hours per month, which can be used instead for more diverse, higher order tasks. The company has already on-boarded 100,000s of merchants to the largest food platforms like Doordash, Deliveroo, and Snackpass, and digitized over 60 million items in multiple languages across North America, Europe, Asia, LATAM, and Australia.
With this bottom rung of digitization complete, Woflow will build the core foundational infrastructure to help bring all local commerce into the digital world, enabling a seamless connection between offline and online for even the most local small businesses. It’s a bold vision with an excellent team we wanted to get behind, so last year we joined our friends at Base10 to co-lead Woflow’s Series A. You can read more here via TechCrunch.
The company is scaling fast to deliver on customer demand and hiring for roles in San Francisco, remotely in the US, and around the world.