Workflow automation may not be what gets you out of bed every morning, but it has long been a hot topic in the business software world. After all, there are few companies that don’t have dozens and dozens of repetitive workflows that are currently done manually and that can be automated. based in Munich Flowers Softwarewhich originally launched in 2019, tries to make its own mark in this field by offering a slightly different approach than many of its competitors.
The company announced today that it has raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VCwith the participation of LEA partners and collective enterprises. A number of angel investors also participated, including Personio’s co-founder Ignaz Forstmeier, SAP Hybris’ founder Carsten Thoma, SevDesk founders Fabian Silberer and Marco Reinbold, and Ironhack co-founder Gonzalo Manrique.
Image Credits: Flowers Software
Founded by Andreas Martin and Daniel Vockler, who have both spent time with a number of small and medium-sized companies, Flowers currently focuses its marketing on two use cases: invoice approvals and general approvals. But the idea behind the tool is to offer a highly flexible no-code workflow tool to automate virtually any repetitive business process.
“When we founded Flowers, we knew we would solve this big problem because of our experience from our previous jobs, the different industries and company sizes, etc.”, said Martin. “What we’ve learned is that literally every day countless tasks go wrong in any business. […] And unfortunately, since most tasks are in recurring workflows, they repeatedly go wrong. For all these problems, you will find one tool that solves exactly this problem. So you can have 1,000 problems and 1,001 tools to solve them. But Daniel and I didn’t want to create another one-solution tool.”
Flower team photo. Image Credits: Flowers Software
Martin noted that many traditional workflow automation tools focus on the backend, while Flowers provides everyone in the company with tools to build these workflows, as well as access to a user interface to walk through these workflows from start to finish. He noted that this also helps make information more accessible and transparent to everyone within a company. And while users can integrate many third-party tools, for many of the current use cases, teams do much of their work in Flowers themselves.
The team started by building Flowers as a general purpose automation tool, but found that giving all this freedom to the users only led to confusion. So after some trial and error, Flowers decided to develop a few templates for common usage scenarios – billing is one of them – and that’s how the service took off. Now what the team needs to do — and what Flowers will use at least some of the new funding for — is build templates for more use cases so it can expand its user base. The team also plans to expand its marketing efforts beyond the current core market of most German-speaking countries into more of Europe and North America.
Image Credits: Flowers Software
“We are going to launch with different use cases in different countries, or service work for use cases in each country, but some countries have more problems with contracts and approvals or travel costs,” explains Martin. “Our highly customizable software makes it possible for us to support those laws, regulations and compliance rules very easily because the tool is flexible enough.”
Flowers Software was cash flow positive early in its history, but the team now decided to increase to grow faster and capture more of the market. “We really want to push as hard as we can and scale as hard as we can,” said Martin.
“Flowers is changing the game for SMBs in business efficiency, productivity and profitability with a different approach to creating and automating workflows that resonates with many customers across industries,” said Judith Dada, general partner at La Famiglia VC. “With Flowers, companies finally have software that adapts to the way they work, instead of software that requires the customer to change. We are impressed with the product and the strong sales force that Andreas, Daniel and the team have already acquired and are excited to support them in scaling up to new markets.”
