Merchant data platform Woflow emerges from stealth with $3.5M

Woflow, a San Francisco-based data infrastructure company offering a standardized management platform for enterprises’ merchant data operations, is helping streamline the food delivery ecosystem during the pandemic. The company today announced its emergence from stealth with $3.5 million in funding from Craft Ventures and Base10 Partners, which it plans to put toward R&D, including scaling its product for new online ordering verticals and further developing its data science teams.

IT teams are struggling to make sense of unstructured data, which is a problem for vendors in the food tech industry. Restaurants, for example, need their menu data translated to delivery applications with speed and accuracy, particularly to keep up with pandemic-driven demand. Woflow claims its system gets vendors onto end user enterprise platforms like Doordash within 24 hours instead of the traditional two weeks.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Woflow cofounder Will Bewley explained that the company is focused on structuring unstructured data. “Something like 90% of the world’s data is unstructured, and if it’s unstructured, it’s unusable in terms of powering business decisions or facilitating transitions,” Bewley said. “And so we’re helping drive this digital shift by providing that data infrastructure.” Bewley added that Woflow is a data infrastructure product that — like Stripe — can process lines of code that have been input and use them to power online processing.

Companies like DoorDash and SnackPass are using Woflow’s technology to digitize and maintain their vendors’ menus. Woflow’s infrastructure can reduce the heavily manual processes these delivery platforms have historically used to onboard and maintain that data, allowing them to better scale and reduce related operational costs.

Woflow went through a lengthy process of development to reach this point. The company’s journey began with a SaaS tool that morphed into the more comprehensive data infrastructure platform it now offers. Cofounder Jordan Nemrow explained that the company has been automating small pieces of its product over the past year to maximize its data operations. The platform now runs on Rails and GraphQL, with some support from Node, and uses React on its front end. Woflow uses PyTorch for its AI and ML services, which are all hosted on AWS.

Digitalizing complex processes and trying to produce them at scale is an enormous challenge, Nemrow said. “And so that is really where we do shine.”

He added that Woflow is constantly working behind the scenes. “So when you’re on Doordash and you’re ordering a pizza, or if you’re ordering avocado toast from a foodie shop, it doesn’t matter which menu you’re ordering from, that data is likely being built within our product,” Nemrow said.

Woflow was founded in 2017 and currently has 12 employees.