The founders of Ziflow may be based in London, but they feel Dallas’ gravitational pull—both today and from their past.

CEO Anthony Welgemoed and Chief Strategy Officer Mat Atkinson previously co-founded ProofHQ, an early pioneer in online proofing, and opened a U.S. office for it in downtown Dallas.

After selling that company in 2015 to Workfront (later acquired by Adobe), a year later they co-founded Ziflow—an enterprise creative workflow platform “for centralizing feedback on any creative asset using any device.”

Their positive experience with ProofHQ put Dallas right back in their plans.

Dallas-based Marketing EVP Ryan Dunagan

“Although the Ziflow headquarters is technically based in London, they knew they wanted to open a U.S. office for their go-to-market team,” Ryan Dunagan, Dallas-based EVP of marketing at Ziflow, told Dallas Innovates. “Dallas was a natural fit with its central U.S. location, expansive talent pool, and vibrant culture.”

“The Dallas office is primarily for the go-to-market teams which consist of sales, marketing, and customer success,” Dunagan added. “Most of our sales team lives and operates out of the Dallas office and our remote employees come to our Dallas office to meet and collaborate with each other. It’s been a fantastic experience for Ziflow.”

Dallas team is slated for growth after $20M Series A round

Dallas-based Chief Revenue Officer Todd Hogan

Of Ziflow’s 140 global employees, its Dallas office has a head count of 28 but is slated to “grow to over 40 in the next 12-18 months” following recent news. Earlier this month, Ziflow announced closing a $20 million Series A funding round led by New York’s Riverside Acceleration Capital and Boston-based Companyon Ventures. The round boosted Ziflow’s total equity funding to $27 million. 

CEO Welgemoed said the funding round “gives us the mandate to continue on the path we’ve laid out, helping teams solve their core challenges around feedback, review, and approval.”

“This investment will allow us to continue delivering an unparalleled experience for our customers and help marketing and creative teams around the world save time and money while improving the quality of their work,” Welgemoed added in a statement.

Locally, “we will continue to hire in Dallas in the area of sales, human resources, and marketing,” Dunagan said. The Dallas office has dedicated sales and marketing leadership in Chief Revenue Officer Todd Hogan and Marketing EVP Dunagan. The U.S. team is led by Florida-based COO Derek Langone.

Helping brands from Showtime to McCann Worldgroup to AWS

Ziflow says it empowers agencies and brands to deliver exceptional creative work “by streamlining feedback on any creative asset from concept to completion.” The company’s “thousands of customers” worldwide include Showtime, McCann Worldgroup, AWS, Weber, Specialized, and Dupont. Review sites like TrustRadius, G2, and Capterra have recognized Ziflow as “best-in-class by user and peer,” the company says.

“Creative asset quality has a significant impact on business performance,” Dunagan said. “However, most creative teams have an extremely disjointed and chaotic creative workflow process… The review and approval process is inefficient, highly manual, and very broken. Ziflow fixes that.”

To do that, Ziflow’s platform “easily captures feedback” on any creative asset—digital, print, video, and more—and automatically routes the asset to completion. It integrates with other design, project management, and file storage platforms in the creative process “for a seamless experience for creative teams, and smooths out the review and approval friction.”

“As a result, creative teams see a reduction in the time it takes to get a creative asset from version 1 to version complete by more than 50%,” Dunagan said. “By automating much of the manual process, creative teams free up lost creative capacity. They now spend more time on creative work which elevates the level of quality they deliver.”

Leveraging AI for ‘faster, more accurate, and more automated feedback’

Ziflow says it’s looking for “new and innovative ways” to leverage artificial intelligence inside the creative process.

“AI is changing the world around us, and we’ve been hard at work on developing ways to leverage new technologies which will allow for faster, more accurate, and more automated feedback on assets,” Welgemoed said. “Image and text recognition, quality control, sentiment analysis, predictive approval, automated and personalized feedback are all areas where we’ll look to innovate in 2023.”

Pursuing a partnership with UT Dallas

Ziflow says it has spoken informally with the University of Texas at Dallas about its sales program, viewing it as a potential partner.

“Their curriculum is a strong match with our hiring profile, so we expect to formalize a partnership this quarter,” Dunagan told us.

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