Built by two kids from
manufacturing families.

David’s family makes and distributes the silicone oil in the shampoo and conditioner on your shelf. Growing up in the business, he saw how much of it ran on spreadsheets, emails, WeChat and invoices. Orders were keyed in by hand, sales were tracked in files only one person understood, and his dad stayed late to make the numbers line up.

So he automated it. The order intake and sales work that used to take 15 hours a week started running on its own, and that time went back into what mattered: better products and more accounts.

With a Bachelor’s in AI from UBC, he went on to spend four and a half years building AI software for businesses, first as a software engineer at Dyne, then as a founder at Antler, where he built AI agents for lawyers.

But he always felt he could do more for people like his dad.

Good people, spending their best hours on work that never needed a person.

Zach’s family manufactures consumer goods like mugs and bakeware. He saw firsthand how much goes into making something as ordinary as the mug you drink your coffee from each morning. And when he built forecasting for the plant, he experienced the other side of the equation: the systems that are supposed to help CPG companies make decisions can become a source of failure themselves.

The data is messy. The supplier catalogs don’t match. Information lives in different places. And eventually, someone has to sit down and make sense of it.

Zach became obsessed with solving that problem.

With a Master’s in AI from Duke, he went on to build sophisticated data pipelines for enterprise companies like Wayfair, where he took some of the messiest supplier catalogs and transformed them into clean, usable information that could flow directly into retail production.

The technology was powerful. But the lesson was human.

ManuFlow should be about giving people the ability to do more of what only people can do.