Raleigh-based Wrangle has raised what it’s describing as an “oversubscribed” $2 million pre-seed round – and local investors lined up to participate.
The fundraise, announced by the company Wednesday, was led by Bloomberg Beta and Eniac Ventures, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Hustle Fund and TDF Ventures. But it also included more than 20 angel investors, a list that contained a slew of local startup founders, such as Robbie Allen (founder of Automated Insights), James Avery (founder of Kevel), Ben Weinberger (founder of DigitalSmiths), Alex Lassiter (founder of Green Places) and Anil Chawla (founder of Archive Social).
We asked, and local investors said it was the track record of Wrangle's founders Adam Long and Adam Smith that piqued their interest. Long and Smith started Wrangle in 2020 in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and rode the remote working trend to Wrangle's benefit.
Wrangle’s technology automates a company’s workflows, approvals and tickets – tracking work and notifying people to take action in chat platforms like Slack.
Smith had previously been Automated Insights’ chief operating officer, and Long was its vice president of product management and engineering. The artificial intelligence company provided earnings summaries for the Associated Press and powered fantasy sports updates for Yahoo. Automated Insights was bought out by Vista Equity Partners in 2015 for $80 million.
As Automated Insights grew, Smith and Long saw complexities mount, creating gaps in communication. They created Wrangle to cut through the complexities. They took advantage of as many startup resources as they could before raising capital, such as the NC Idea Grant program. Along the way, they fostered and formed relationships that would prove critical to assembling a cash runway.
Allen, for example, worked with Smith and Long at Automated Insights.
“I’m very excited about Wrangle,” he said.
Avery said Smith was “one of the first people I met when I moved to the Triangle back in 2007.”
“It’s a bet on him and Adam Long,” Avery said. “It’s a real dream team of founders.”
Chawla also credited his relationship with the founders as driving his initial interest in investing. But he said he had actually experienced the problem Wrangle’s technology is trying to solve while at ArchiveSocial.
“We had a number of cross-team workflows that would get bypassed or side-tracked by the natural impulse for people to Slack each other,” he said. “Wrangle is a simple yet effective solution to a real problem that practically every growing organization is facing.”
Lassiter said he leans on two "beliefs" when investing at this stage.
"One is believing the long term market problem, the second belief is your confidence in the team figuring it out," Lassiter said. "The future of work will require managers to track collaboration across multiple employees in different geographies - and there aren't any good tools to do that today. The Wrangle founding team is strong, and I believe they'll figure out how to solve this problem."
Long and Smith, who announced the raise via social media and blog post, were not immediately available to comment.
