A Durham company trying to revolutionize the way companies use Slack has closed on another $2 million as it pushes out a product aimed at making your interactions with your firm’s Help Desk easier.
Wrangle raised an oversubscribed – and, according to co-founder Adam Smith, “opportunistic” – $2 million seed round led by Boston-based Accomplice.
Accomplice was joined by other new investors in the round, including Correlation Ventures and, locally, the Tweener Fund led by serial entrepreneurs Scot Wingo and Robbie Allen, the latter of which used to work with Smith at Automated Insights.
Existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Eniac Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and TDF Ventures also participated.
Wrangle, which describes itself as a modern conversational workflow engine that operates through Slack, is treating the capital as “more fuel” to keep attacking the market, Smith said.
He said the team made the initial contact with the new investors when it raised its last seed financing. “We kept close to the Accomplice folks and as they heard we had inbound interest, they said what about raising right now?” Smith said.
Smith estimates the round gives the firm runway through 2024 depending on hiring and marketing spend.
“It’s an unsure market, so it’s nice to have that cash to be able to grow in the way we want,” he said.
The plan is to add to the seven-person team, particularly though hires in marketing. The firm, located at American Underground, is also looking for developers, he said.
Smith calls the support validating, a “sign that they were excited, that they all upped their percentage,” he said of existing backers.
Wrangle is coming off of what Smith describes as a “really good year,” where the company quintupled its revenue and saw 150,000 workflows launch through its system. In those workflows Smith and team saw common requests from human resources departments and IT groups – onboarding, vendor approvals, invoicing. But there were also one-off requests coming in all day through direct messaging. So the Wrangle team saw an opportunity to disrupt the ticket filing system.
“No one loves filing a ticket,” he said, adding that your company’s help desk probably doesn’t like processing them either. “We think Slack and chat in general is perfectly lined up with that. It’s a conversational thing where you can easily ask a question.”
But with chat workflows, it’s easy to lose those tickets.
“We saw that space as one we could potentially disrupt,” Smith said, adding that the goal of the product is to make “filing a ticket as easy as posting a Slack message.”
Part of the capital raise will go toward the new Slack-integrated ticketing system that targets IT leaders in hybrid workplaces.
It’s a good fit for Smith and his co-founder, Adam Long. Smith came from Automated Insights, an AI firm that developed ways to “write” articles for the likes of Yahoo Fantasy Sports. Long came from Hemingway App, an app that helps writers write more clearly. Smith said the plan is to use the natural language processing skills they’ve built up through the years to create a conversational ticketing system.
