Wrangle raised $2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding to advance its technology that automates workflows, approvals and tickets so that a company can track work and provide call-to-action tasks within chat platforms like Slack.
Bloomberg Beta and Eniac Ventures co-led the investment, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Hustle Fund, TDF Ventures and more than 20 founder angel investors.
Adam Smith and Adam Long founded Wrangle in 2020 and bootstrapped the remote company until now. This is the third company where they have worked together. Most recently they were COO and CTO, respectively, at Automated Insights, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners.
While growing a startup, they saw firsthand how software could play into the new remote way of working.
“It’s easy to get operations done when you are in the same office and with five people around the table, but when you are growing really fast, and real departments begin to emerge, you need a process to handle the team-to-team handoffs,” Adam Smith said.
However, as more people live in different time zones and are working with different goals and processes, that can throw a wrench in the gears. Add into that the global pandemic where everyone was home, and it separated teams further, Smith added.
In their research, they saw Slack direct messages and channels get busy as people dealt with up to 100 requests per week with little way to audit/track where people were in the process.
Wrangle is solving this problem by giving companies a new way to run operations directly in the tools where employees are already talking to each other, like Slack and Microsoft Teams. The company’s no-code software can automate any kind of process: employee onboarding, contract approvals, help tickets or any other recurring work. It also gathers requests with forms, assigns and notifies people to follow-up and tracks the progress for everyone to follow.
Now when colleagues are assigned a task, like onboarding an employee, an automated checklist pops up, and employees check off their steps and don’t have to worry about what to do because all the work is automated for them, Long said.
Wrangle task and approval apps. Image Credits: Wrangle
Wrangle launched in February 2021, initially with Slack, and now more than 800 organizations have used the workflow builder to complete over 10,000 workflows. One of their customers, Reuben Doetsch, co-founder and CTO of AvantStay, started using Wrangle for bug reports and future requests.
“The AvantStay team has been growing rapidly and Wrangle is the tool behind the scenes that keeps our workflows on track in Slack,” Doetsch said in a written statement. “We use it for everything from processing refunds to managing changes to property listings. Wrangle saves us hundreds of hours a month while also ensuring nothing gets lost in the chaos of Slack.”
The new round of funding will enable Wrangle to grow its team from just the two founders, invest in product development and accelerate its marketing efforts. The tool is expanding into Microsoft Teams and will be launching a web app for building workflows and analyzing them to move the work along. The company has dozens of paying customers and is growing revenue at 20% to 30% every month.
Investor Karin Klein, founding partner of Bloomberg Beta, said via email that her firm looks at the future of work and how to make work better.
She says that as Slack and Teams become the places where more people work together, the Wrangle team has created a way to have ticketing workflows happen where the work happens without being siloed in with other products.
“Adam and Adam are exceptional founders who have created an easy to use approach to ticketing so we don’t have to switch between multiple applications, saving everyone time and ensuring important approvals don’t get missed,” Klein added. “The need for Wrangle is only going to grow as work remains hybrid and distributed.”