Toby Scammell and the business of getting through the door

A restaurant owner can recognize a regular customer across a crowded room. Remembering everyone who paid by card last month is a different proposition. Keeping in touch with them requires another job, another system, another little demand on a day already spoken for. Toby Scammell spent much of his working life trying to sell an answer to that problem. At Womply, the answer involved customer data, automation and a less glamorous invention: a dependable way to get the software through the door.

There is something revealing about a founder who writes at length about distribution. Software invites demonstrations of cleverness. Distribution invites questions about who will answer the telephone, who already knows the merchant, and whether the cost of finding the next customer leaves anything over. Scammell made those questions part of his public argument for Womply. They explain much of its growth. They also make its later difficulties especially consequential.

Before the customer directory, there was dinner

Scammell’s early ventures were close to the pavement. During high school and college, he ran small online businesses that included Costco delivery and advertising for local restaurants, bars and lounges. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2006, studying international relations with an emphasis in global business. His professional route included an associate consultant role at Bain & Company.

Then came Feastery, a San Francisco restaurant venture he co-founded before Womply. It occupied him with customer acquisition and loyalty: the recurring problem of persuading somebody to come in, enjoy the experience, and eventually come back. A restaurant can serve an excellent meal and still have an empty table tomorrow. There is very little romance in an empty table’s accounts.

That history gives Womply’s later products a recognizable lineage. The business owner was already doing the essential work. The missing piece was a practical way to maintain the relationship after a customer left. Scammell founded Womply in 2011. Its chosen market included businesses for which a dedicated marketing department would have been an extravagant addition to the payroll.

His public self-description offers a modest personal counterweight to the business vocabulary. He lists elephants, photography and pizza among his likes. The pizza sits comfortably beside the restaurant ventures. The elephants require no strategic explanation, which is rather their charm. A founder is allowed an interest that cannot be plotted on a revenue chart.

The route to the next merchant

In March 2018, Scammell described Womply’s approach as “distribution-first.” His argument began with the economics of the customer. A large company may support an expensive sale and extensive customization. A small business spends less. Reaching many such businesses efficiently becomes central to whether the supplier can survive.

He described years of work on onboarding and acquisition. He also acknowledged costs: some early customers did not receive enough lasting value, frustration and churn followed, investors disagreed, and some employees left. That admission makes the argument more interesting than a polished victory speech. A choice about where to spend engineering time becomes a choice about which customer experience to improve first.

Womply developed relationships with credit-card processors and other merchant-facing businesses. These were organizations already connected to the shops it wanted to serve. The route mattered because the owner did not have to discover an unfamiliar software company entirely alone. Payment partnerships placed Womply closer to an existing commercial relationship.

The company announced a $30 million growth-equity financing led by Sageview Capital in November 2016. Scammell’s thesis was gaining the resources to travel further. By 2018, he was discussing a company serving more than 100,000 paying small businesses. The unit of ambition was no longer a handful of San Francisco restaurants.

An employee who never asks for a login

The product philosophy was equally pointed. Scammell compared small-business software to another employee. Owners wanted work done; the amount of time they spent operating the software could be a poor measure of its usefulness. A successful system might give them fewer reasons to touch it.

“I think about small business software as just another employee.”Toby Scammell, 2018

Womply Engage made that idea concrete. Its customer directory used transaction information to build and update records. Merchants could search those records and identify valuable customers. Automated emails could welcome newcomers or try to bring inactive customers back. The intended beneficiary was an owner who needed repeat business but had little appetite for maintaining a database.

“We’ve built a system that does the heavy lifting for them,” Scammell said. His complaint about customer records was practical: many local businesses had little orderly information to begin with. A system demanding hours of careful data entry would inherit the same constraint that had kept the records untidy.

Behind that convenience sat Womply’s Commerce Graph, the data resource underpinning its software. In 2018, Scammell described extensive work ingesting, cleaning and storing information, with annual spending in the tens of millions. The invisible employee had a substantial back office. He treated ready-to-use data as part of the product, rather than something a customer should have to supply before anything useful happened.

A separate chapter in the public record

Scammell’s career also includes a securities-fraud conviction. In April 2014, he pleaded guilty over trading before Disney’s 2009 acquisition of Marvel Entertainment. He admitted using confidential information obtained through his then-girlfriend, who had worked on the transaction. He bought Marvel call options and made more than $192,000 in profits after the deal became public.

He received a three-month prison sentence. The SEC’s account also records four years of supervised release. These events overlapped Womply’s early life; they belong in the chronology rather than in a detachable footnote to a founder biography.

The later regulatory history requires precision too. In July 2019, the SEC vacated specified collateral bars covering several kinds of securities-industry association because the underlying conduct preceded the relevant Dodd-Frank provisions. It left the remainder of its 2014 order unchanged. That partial change did not erase the guilty plea. Broad descriptions of either a complete reversal or an unchanged blanket ban would lose the distinction.

When the promise became a fast lane

Womply later moved into Paycheck Protection Program application services. PPP Fast Lane brought Scammell’s interest in reaching small businesses into a different setting. An owner seeking financing had an immediate practical concern: whether the application would lead to money, and how long the process would take.

The company’s present historical account says its technology supported roughly 1.4 million loans through participating lenders in 2021. Womply handled intake and screening; lenders made lending decisions. The company says it completed a merger in 2021 and wound down operations in 2022. Its website now preserves a retrospective account and guidance for former applicants.

In March 2024, the FTC alleged that Womply and Scammell had misrepresented the speed and likelihood of funding. Its complaint said more than 60 percent of applications never resulted in funded loans, and described technical and customer-service problems. These were allegations about how the service was advertised and delivered, with real significance for applicants working against a deadline.

Womply disputes the interpretation of the application figures in its current account, pointing to abandoned applications, screening and lender or government decisions. That explanation is the company’s position. It does not alter the legal outcome: on April 3, 2024, a federal court entered a stipulated order imposing a $26 million judgment and a permanent injunction. Womply and Scammell neither admitted nor denied the complaint’s allegations.

The order prohibits misrepresentations about financial products and services, including the likelihood of receiving them and processing times. Its terms bring the story back to a founder’s ordinary vocabulary: speed, service, delivery. Once those words are used to attract customers, they become commitments whose consequences extend beyond the sale.

The door opens in both directions

The public chronology continues. An October 1, 2026 federal docket records Oto Analytics LLC and Scammell filing a contract-related declaratory-judgment action against Cory Capoccia, Womply’s former president and co-founder. The filing establishes that a dispute reached court. It supplies no verdict on the underlying claims.

What emerges from Scammell’s career is a sustained interest in the business owner’s limited attention. From restaurant loyalty to automated customer records, he returned to work that small teams struggled to do consistently. His distribution argument recognized another limitation: a product cannot help an owner it never reaches.

The harder question arrives after that first contact. A merchant has agreed to trust a new system with a piece of the working day. An applicant has agreed to trust a process with a financial deadline. The value of the relationship depends on what follows. Scammell’s story keeps returning to the doorway, where a persuasive offer meets the person who must live with the result.