Funding Lab: Meet Cherie Yang, Founder of Visualist.

Say hello to Cherie, founder of Visualist. Visualist enables styling and design creatives to automate workflows, increase client satisfaction and scale their high-touch businesses in a high-tech, no-code way.

We were lucky enough to meet Cherie at this year’s Funding Lab: Our new fast-paced, two-part programme for founders looking to raise investment from a VC. The course is designed to help early-stage founders tune their pitch and prepare for a raise with straight-talking, actionable learnings direct from our VC investors and industry specialists from our Studio team. 

We sat down with Cherie to learn how the idea for Visualist came about, what she’s working on now and where she’s planning on taking the business in the future. 

Tell us a little bit about your business.

Visualist helps stylists and designers to automate workflows and scale their high-touch businesses with no code. We use AI to help creatives reduce mundane and repetitive workflows, helping them focus on what matters: creative work.

How did the idea come about?

I was designing and building my own home and experienced major pain points when curating and communicating my vision. Things were inefficient, time-consuming and simply too admin-heavy for what was meant to be a fun and visual process!

What's the story so far?

We are in private beta and have been growing healthily through word of mouth. Our product is fully functioning with a self-organising library and a time-saving mood-boarding tool. We're also working on our no-code client portal and the workflow automations within, to help creatives streamline communication.

What are you hoping to achieve in the next 12 months?

It's full steam ahead with product development, and we're also planning to grow our engineering and data science/machine learning teams. We also just received our largest Innovate UK grant to develop more AI-powered tools (think Grammarly for creatives).

What advice would you give to other early-stage founders looking to launch a company?

Surround yourself with your network of founders. No one quite understands the highs and lows of building- except other founders who are deep in the trenches themselves!

What did you learn during Forward's Funding Lab?

Practical tips for and common pitfalls to avoid when fundraising -- which I'm about to embark on!

Funding Lab provided real, actionable pointers on how to go about structuring my pitch and fundraise. I found this incredibly helpful, and also appreciated the supportive and collegiate atmosphere among the Forward team and fellow founders.

We're looking forward to watching the next stage in Cherie’s journey! You can find out more about Visualist here.