Announcing Our Investment in Flock AI 🦜

AI-Native Content Infrastructure for Modern Retail

We are thrilled to announce that Work-Bench led Flock’s $6M Seed round. The round includes participation from January Ventures, Red Bike Capital, Outlander VC, and strategic angels.

The round comes as retail brands face a fundamental shift: ecommerce success now depends on delivering personalized, high-quality visual storytelling at scale, something traditional photoshoots and first-generation AI tools were never designed to support.

Traditional photo shoots are slow, expensive, and fundamentally limit how much content brands can produce. They were built for seasonal campaigns, not continuous content generation across massive catalogs.

At the same time, generic AI image tools have failed to earn enterprise trust. While they can generate images quickly, they lack product accuracy, brand safety, and the workflow integration creative teams require. For large brands, “almost right” isn’t good enough.

That’s where Flock comes in.

Flock is building the AI-native content engine for retail, replacing traditional photo shoots with brand-accurate imagery and video at scale, while fitting directly into how creative and merchandising teams already work.

Acting as a creative team’s co-pilot, Flock allows brands to generate tailored, brand-accurate product imagery for every customer, channel, and context, without expanding headcount or budgets. Using reinforcement learning and brand-specific AI models, Flock enables one-to-one ecommerce experiences that were previously impossible, while freeing creative teams to focus on the tasks that move the needle.

Why Now

Retail content is hitting a structural breaking point.

Product catalogs are expanding. Channels are fragmenting. Personalization expectations are rising. Yet content production capacity remains constrained by cost, timelines, and headcount.

Retailers are under margin pressure and being asked to do more with less. They need higher content velocity without sacrificing brand integrity or increasing spend.

First-generation AI image tools educated the market on what’s possible - but also revealed their limits. Generic outputs, brand inconsistency, and lack of workflow integration left enterprise retailers searching for vertical, production-grade solutions.

Creative teams are willing to adopt AI when it doesn’t ask them to compromise quality, control, or process.

This convergence of pressure, maturity, and readiness is what makes this moment different.

The Product

From photo shoots to content infrastructure.

Flock is not an AI image studio or a standalone creative tool. It is a full-stack content system designed to replace the parts of retail content workflows that no longer scale.

At the core of the platform is Flock’s brand DNA dataset.

Every creative approval feeds into more than 200 brand-specific parameters that encode a company’s visual language, style rules, and constraints. Approved assets are pushed directly back into existing DAM and ecommerce systems.

Unlike static AI tools, Flock uses reinforcement learning to learn from creative team feedback, approval patterns, and real customer conversion data. Over time, this creates a compounding advantage where output quality, brand alignment, and performance improve with every asset generated.

This allows teams to:

• Generate brand-accurate ecommerce, editorial, and video content at scale

• Maintain control over every element lighting, pose, background, fabric texture, and detail down to every stitch line and zipper

• Reduce production timelines from months to days without changing creative workflows

• Produce inclusive, realistic imagery across skin tones, body types, ages, and textures

By turning content creation into a repeatable production pipeline, Flock enables a shift from one-off assets to continuous content infrastructure.

Traction

From pilots to real production impact.

Flock is already working with billion-dollar fashion and beauty brands with rapid expansion across product catalogs and channels.

What stood out to us is how quickly the platform moves from experimentation to impact.

Customers report up to 90% cost savings compared to traditional photo shoots, alongside 30%+ conversion lift driven by better coverage, faster iteration, and more relevant content.

Because Flock plugs directly into existing ecommerce and DAM workflows, teams can adopt it without re-architecting how they work. That combination of immediate ROI and deep workflow fit is what gives Flock a path to becoming durable infrastructure rather than an optional tool.

The Team

Built by insiders solving their own problem.

CEO Vita Mallela spent years leading merchandising and creative operations at Bloomingdale’s and Jet.com/Walmart, managing multi-billion-dollar P&Ls and experiencing firsthand how slow and expensive traditional photo shoots can be.

She’s building the platform she wished she had.

CTO Malavika Reddy brings over a decade of AI and computer vision experience from Microsoft and Brightcom, where she built and scaled production machine learning systems.

Together, they bring a rare combination of operator empathy and technical rigor. They understand exactly what creative and merchandising teams need because they’ve lived the problem themselves.

Why Work-Bench Is Excited

This is the kind of investment we get excited about: a team solving a mission-critical problem they’ve lived firsthand that sits directly on the path to revenue and brand trust.

Across diligence, the feedback from large retailers was remarkably consistent. A multi-brand apparel company told us the results versus their prior solution were “night and day.” A global luxury retailer that evaluated nearly a dozen vendors said Flock was “the only platform we tested where the images actually looked real.”

After testing dozens of pilots, and in side-by-side evaluations, teams were especially struck by how consistently Flock handled the details that broke other tools. Competing solutions struggled with prints, adding buttons that didn’t exist or losing pockets entirely. Flock was the only platform customers tested that reliably produced correct creases, folds, and shadows, handled complex patterns and prints, and maintained model consistency without creating exact duplicates. In one case, the output quality was so realistic that a marketing team initially didn’t believe the images were AI-generated.

That quality is already translating into real production impact. At one enterprise retailer, teams generated “5,000-6,000 images in a single month” to launch a new shopping experience, and saw a “roughly 3 percentage point lift in conversion since launch.” Another large brand told us they are now replacing meaningful portions of traditional photography rather than treating AI as a side experiment.

Execution matters just as much as output. Multiple customers emphasized that Flock works within existing creative and merchandising workflows and comes with hands-on support when edge cases arise. As one team put it, “it’s not just a tool, we need someone who understands our workflows and can troubleshoot in real time.”

With a natural path from imagery into video, personalization, and broader commerce workflows, we believe Flock is becoming foundational infrastructure for modern retail.

What’s Next

If you’re excited about building AI-native infrastructure for modern retail, now is the time to join. Reach out to the Flock team to learn more about open roles and how you can be part of what they’re building.

We’re excited to support Flock as they grow the team behind the future of retail content.

Welcome to the Work-Bench family, Flock! You can check out their press coverage in Vogue Business and PR Newswire.