Fast-growth companies, regardless of industry, eventually arrive at a similar point in their growth cycle: they realize they face mountainous amounts of time-sensitive operational tasks – but have minimal bandwidth to handle them.
Mohannad El-Barachi & David Li are no strangers to the challenges which hyper-growth scaleups face. Former Founder & CEO and COO respectively of SweetIQ, a company that helps businesses manage digital location marketing, El-Barachi & Li noticed that, as they scaled from $1M to +$10M, they faced numerous roadblocks along the way when it came to process and delivery automation. Heavily dependent on manual support, SweetIQ did what most organizations are routinely forced to do: increase headcount.
“We hired more people to handle tasks which we knew could be automated,” said El-Barachi. “I thought to myself: there had to be a better way for companies to successfully leverage the power of automation in ways that truly enabled and supported fast-growing organizations.”
In 2017, after steering the company to four straight years of +300% growth and the addition of over 100 employees, El-Barachi and Li led SweetIQ to a successful acquisition by ReachLocal, a USA Today Network company part of Gannett Co., Inc.
Automation
Post-acquisition of SweetIQ, El-Barachi and David Li put their heads together around the problem of automation.
“Really quickly we realized the problem we were aiming to understand was 1000 times larger than we had originally thought,” said El-Barachi. “We focused our work on a reframed question: ‘How can we help organizations deliver at scale?’”
Serial technology entrepreneur & Wrk co-founder Mo El-Barachi
Wrk Technologies was the answer.
The world’s first Integration & Delivery Platform, Wrk’s software is a “delivery engine” designed to easily and quickly help companies fulfill their work at scale. From simple data entry to building entire presentations out of a single document to generating custom reports and configuring websites, Wrk is powered by advanced automation and supplemented by a remote, 24/7, on-demand Wrkforce.
Scale
Officially launched in September 2019, Wrk has since grown to over 50 employees and counts a strong leadership team in its arsenal. Unique in the market in terms of both its market positioning and its technical ability, Wrk fills a clear gap in the automation market.
When it came to getting routine-style and more advanced tasks done, the options available in the market were clear: humans (costly, and potentially subject to bias and error); Zapier and similar connector applications (reliant on public API’s and designed for smaller, repetitive task automation); Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which required internal expertise, heavy technical overhead and remains extremely costly overall. So how does Wrk differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded playing field? The answer is through innovation.
Wrk creates pre-built, pre-configured Wrk Actions which remove the burden of choice while guaranteeing price, speed and efficiency. More cost-effective than RPA yet substantially more robust than Zapier, Wrk quickly realized automation wasn’t about erasing the role of the human in work completion; it was about optimizing it. They built an on-demand, 24/7 team of experts to help maximize the “cognitive piece” of automating tasks – a team of (real) people working in tandem which all clients have access to along with the platform to empower work completion at scale.
Wrk helps any growing organization, from startups to larger enterprises, with a wide variety of work functions including payroll setup, customized client reporting, proposal development, market research, user testing, tax preparation & many more. Wrk’s pre-built workflows make it easy to serve any department within an organization, regardless of size, the scale of workload or the complexity of data.
Automating the completion of work with Wrk has quickly proven to reduce costs by 20% and delivery times by over 65%—and the team has already begun exploring the automation and optimization of more complex tasks ranging from copywriting, legal reviews, x-ray assessments and more. Armed with an impressive roster of clients including Cision, Pomelo Health, Silicon Valley Bank & White Star Capital, investors agree in the power of Wrk.
Growth
After completing an initial Seed round in 2020, with participation by Formentera Capital, Wrk is looking forward to a Series A round in the coming months.
Funding from Seed & future rounds will serve to scale the power of their self-serve platform, continue the development of major partnerships, and kick-start the commercialization of a marketplace for creators.
When asked about the role of Formentera Capital within their investment team, El-Barachi did not hesitate to confirm the team’s value.
“Bringing {Formentera Capital} onboard meant bringing on true operators who understood the real challenges of a scale-up,” said El-Barachi. “Their accomplishments in the operations of fast-growth technology companies aside, we felt a personal alignment with them simply as people.”
Indeed, the philosophical alignment between Wrk and Formentera Capital is a strong one. When automation can exist in tandem with human cognition, instead of erasing it outright, it becomes abundantly clear that the future of work is bright.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
