Unlocking the Potential of Unstructured Data
According to Cision earlier this year, a San Francisco-based startup named Woflow raised $3.5M to launch the world’s first merchant platform in their seed round with David Sacks at Craft Ventures along with Base10 Partners and Flex Capital participating.
As an investor of Facebook, Airbnb, Twitter, Slack, and more, David Sacks, the former COO of Paypal, is a well-known investor in Silicon Valley. So what does David Sacks see in Woflow? Perhaps we can take a sneak peek from his tweet:
“90% of the world’s data is unstructured. @WoflowHQ is creating tools to structure it. You’ve probably already used Woflow because it powers menu data on most of the online food ordering apps. Excited to lead their seed round.”
Living in an era of Big Data, aside from the Big Tech companies, more and more corporations are also transforming from learning to collecting data, in terms of user behavior and customer profile to provide the best products and services. However, most companies are facing the challenge of raw and unstructured data, which requires a massive amount of manpower to label and structure it. So either those companies just give up or they’re not able to fully utilize the assets they have.
With that said, Woflow came into place in 2017 to fill in the gap in that market. As the co-founder Jordan Nemron mentioned in an interview with Forbes, “we founded Woflow on the belief that much of the world’s data is unstructured and that trillions of dollars of value could be unlocked for businesses by structuring it”.
The interesting part is that they decided to tackle the online food business by working with delivery companies like DoorDash first to help restaurant owners digitize their menus and upload the data to the platform. The platform is able to utilize the data in different forms and tagging through Woflow with any kind of usage. Compared to other verticals, the food industry hasn’t been a heavily tech-driven market. However, the menu data, in the meantime, is one of the most complicated types of the dataset that varies from one restaurant to another. With the ongoing pandemic, the need for data management within the industry has risen dramatically in the past two years, which justifies the founders’ decision.
Using this as a starting point, it’s going to be more interesting to see which industry Woflow will choose to tackle next and how rapidly the company can deploy the application among diverse companies to become the leading player in the field. As we can see, aside from Woflow, another startup working on a similar pain point, Verify, has also raised a $12M Series A financing recently according to Cision.
We’re living in an era where all companies need to be tech companies learning to process massive databases, and more and more opportunities are there for relevant startups to explore and be part of it. Last, referring to what Andreessen, founder of a16z, mentioned in his interview
“It can sometimes feel that all the exciting things have already happened, that the frontier is closed, that we’re at the end of technological history and there’s nothing left to do but maintain what already exists,” he continued. “In fact, the opposite is true. We’re surrounded by rotting incumbents that will all need to be replaced by new technologies”
