Wowflow, a mobile-first collaboration and workflow for facility maintenance teams, has raised a €300K pre-seed investment to speed up its growth in the German-speaking markets.
The Vienna-based company was backed by prominent angel investors like Markus Ertler (Austria Business Angel of the Year 2019), Florian Kasslatter (Markas Group and a member of TBA Network), Wolfgang Berger (Mondi Group), Claudia Nagel (ex founder of KIWI KI) from Germany proptech company builder High Rise Ventures, and Siim Teller (ex Skype) from VC fund Lemonade Stand.
Wowflow was founded in 2018 after one of the company’s co-founders experienced challenges while leading the facility management team at Donau Zentrum, one of the largest shopping malls in Vienna. Co-founder and CEO Drazen Ivanis explained: “More than 50% of the time and effort of the maintenance team that I managed was spent on work communication, coordination, and reporting. Yes, the alignment is important, but it was stealing time from real work, which is delivering a high level of field services, fixing issues, and ensuring well being of people working in and visiting the shopping centre”.
Over 25 companies have started using Wowflow because it brings mobile-first and intuitive alignment for the field teams, work efficiency and transparency for maintenance managers, and better facility conditions with lower operational costs for property owners. Manuel Jarc, Head of Facility Management at Forstinger GmbH, commented: “With Wowflow I manage to keep a complete overview with 3 employees and to remain agile. Without Wowflow, I would have to expand the team by another 4 employees and still would have challenges to maintain the stores in a high-quality, on-time manner”.
Accelerated digitalization of the conservative real estate sector combined with the growing trend of outsourcing facility management and maintenance services have helped the company to triple its revenues in 2020 and win clients like Forstinger and Reiwag Facility Services.
Wowflow will use the funding to accelerate sales and continue to invest in its product to improve collaboration with external service providers, enable asset and equipment management, and automate repetitive tasks like scheduling and reporting.
In Europe, more than 220 billion is spent on facility management with around 30 billion coming from the DACH region. While the sector employs around 4.5% of Europe’s workforce, it is still an extremely fragmented market mostly made up of small and medium maintenance teams (up to 50 people) that need a simple & suitable solution they can use from day one.
By Wowflow’s estimates, there are over 50 thousand companies with such teams in the DACH region alone. If the companies want to stay competitive and increase the productivity of their workforce they must continue to invest in digital solutions and processes.
In addition to the pre-seed funding, Wowflow is also supported by the Creative Impact grant from the Austria Wirtschaftsservice, and was recognized as the Best Virtual Teamwork Solution of Austria in 2020.
