After spending a year and a half building a software-as-a-service platform for business and customer management, Richmond-based Wrangld is ready for growth.
“This year is all about scale for us,” co-founder Jonathan Dyke said. “We went through the product build, and we have landed a couple of very strategic partnerships.”
One of those is a new partnership with Atlanta lending company Momnt that allows Wrangld to offer financing options to clients.
Wrangld was founded in late 2021 and offers a scheduling and logistics platform for contractors, HVAC technicians, electricians and others in the building trades. It has around 100 customers.
“We handle everything from the initial phone call to the final invoice and everything in between,” Dyke said.
The partnership with Momnt came out of research Dyke did prior to launching the platform. In 2021, Dyke spent weeks riding alongside building trade technicians in the field. He saw numerous times where a technician would provide the estimate, and the homeowner would ask about financing. The average HVAC install costs about $12,000, and small HVAC companies do not have the resources to provide financing.
“They didn’t close a lot of those jobs,” Dyke said.
Dyke co-founded Wrangld with Mason Herron, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer. Both Dyke and Herron have family who work in the building trades. They often complained about the lack of integration between systems and how hard it was to have a unified communications structure between people in the office and people in the field. Oftentimes information got lost between when a customer called and the technician arrived at a residence.
“The idea [for Wrangld] came from my time at Microsoft,” Dyke said. “The last couple of years I was there, we were migrating everything into [cloud computing platform] Azure. … I got to see tons of different systems. I started to notice that people had 20 different programs to accomplish a job. I thought that was kind of nuts.”
Dyke points to call recording as one of the unique features of the platform and something that provides value. When a customer calls the office to schedule an appointment, the call is recorded in the office. When the call is completed, the recording is uploaded to the cloud and made available to the technician. The technician can listen to the call before arriving at the customer’s home, allowing the technician to understand the problem.
Dyke and Herron launched the beta version late last year and worked with several companies to test the platform. They added features as they built the platform out. Dyke said the key was focusing on end users, something people in technology sometimes forget.
He declined to give revenue numbers and did not want to talk about whether the company was raising money. He said it did an initial friends and family raise when the company was launched. The company has seven employees.
“As a year-and-a-half-old startup, we are always looking for funding,” Dyke said.
The goal over the next year is attract more customers and grow. He believes the partnership with Momnt is a key piece in the puzzle.
“I love solving problems, and helping people go from this process that was a miserable nightmare and saying they hate using their phone or tablet and watching them shift to saying this is so much easier,” Dyke said.