Month: September 2020

Diesel engines are the workhorses of freight transportation and agriculture — and by extension keep the economy fed and well supplied. They also have a dirty side.

The founders of ClearFlame Engine Technologies, a four-year-old startup based in Geneva, Illinois, say they have found a way to clean them up.

The company, which participated in TechCrunch Disrupt’s 2020 Startup Battlefield competition, has developed a novel way to get diesel style engines to operate on renewable fuels like ethanol. The technology essentially combines the performance benefits of the diesel engine design with the low costs and the low emissions associated with these alternative fuels, co-founder and CEO BJ Johnson said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

By replacing 100% of the petroleum fuel with a decarbonized fuel like ethanol, ClearFlame says its technology reduces net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40%, and reduces particulate matter and smog (NOx) to near zero levels.

ClearFlame isn’t redesigning the diesel engine. Instead, Johnson and co-founder and CTO Julie Blumreiter have developed a way to modify the internal components of the engine to alter its thermodynamics to be able to quickly ignite and combust decarbonized fuels. The company’s technology means 80% to 90% of the diesel engine parts remain unchanged, according to Johnson.

The upshot is a technology that provides a fast and low cost way to reduce emissions, Johnson told TechCrunch. It’s the kind of solution that companies might need as local, state and national governments tighten emissions regulations.

The technology can be retrofitted into existing older diesel engines or applied to new engines that have yet to be installed in trucks or used in other industrial applications. ClearFlame is aiming to work directly with the engine manufacturer, which will still give the company access to the secondary market because every OEM has its own aftermarket parts group, Johnson said.

“We want to leverage their supply chain, their ability to scale and reach these markets, and the trusted name that comes with them,” Johnson said, explaining the company’s reasoning for targeting OEMs.

The technology was first developed in a Stanford University lab, where Blumreiter and Johnson earned their Ph.D. degrees. At Stanford, they were focused mostly on ethanol and methanol, which are simple liquid alcohols. However, Johnson noted that further research has shown that the same concept works equally well on natural gas and ammonia.

“The big difference here is that you have to tweak the injection system if you want to move away from a regular ambient liquid fuel,” Johnson said. “There’s just a ton of business value in being able to run an engine efficiently and cleanly on a fuel that just sits in a glass at ambient conditions, which is what those alcohols do.”

ClearFlame has already made headway with its technology, including landing partnerships and raising capital. The company completed a proof-of-concept demonstration of their technology on a Caterpillar engine at Argonne National Laboratory. ClearFlame is also conducting a demonstration on a Cummins engine platform supported by funding from the Department of Energy.

In April, ClearFlame announced it raised $3 million in a round led by CleanEnergy Ventures. The company has also landed several million dollars in grant money, including Small Business Innovation Research awards from the National Science Foundation, DOE and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Crista Galli Ventures, a new early-stage health tech fund in Europe, officially launched last week. The firm offers “patient capital” — with only a single LP (the Danish family office IPQ Capital) — and promises to provide portfolio companies with deep healthcare expertise and the extra runway needed to get over regulatory and efficacy hurdles and to the next stage.

The firm has an initial $65 million to deploy and is led by consultant radiologist Dr. Fiona Pathiraja. With offices in London and Copenhagen, it operates as an “evergreen” fund, meaning it doesn’t follow traditional five-year VC fundraising cycles.

In fact, Crista Galli Ventures’ pitch is that traditional venture isn’t well-suited to early-stage health tech where it can take significantly longer to find product-market fit with healthcare practitioners and systems and then become licensed by local regulators.

To dig deeper into this and CGV’s investment remit more generally, I interviewed Pathiraja about what she looks for in health tech founders and startups. We also discussed Crista Galli LABS, which operates alongside the main fund and backs founders from underrepresented backgrounds at the pre-seed stage.

TechCrunch: You describe Crista Galli Ventures (CGV) as an early-stage health tech fund that offers patient capital and backs companies in Europe. In particular, you cite deep tech, digital health and personalised healthcare. Can you elaborate a bit more on the fund’s remit and what you look for in founders and startups at such an early stage?

Dr. Fiona Pathiraja: We like founders with bold ideas and international ambitions. We look for mission-driven founders who believe their companies can make a real and positive impact on the lives of people and patients the world over.

We will look for founders who deeply understand the problem they are trying to tackle from all angles — especially the patient’s perspective, but also that of the clinician and relevant regulators — and we want to see that they are building their solutions to solve this. This means they will make an effort to understand the complex and nuanced healthcare landscape and all the stakeholders in it.

In terms of founder characteristics, in my opinion, the best founders will be mission driven, able to tell a compelling story, and motivate others to join them. Grit and resilience are important and several of our portfolio companies were founded around 6-8 years ago and they are doggedly continuing to build.

Crover’s robotic platform isn’t the sexiest or most exciting — particularly for a startup that began life with space travel in its sights. But the real future of robotics and automation lies in the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks employers have difficult finding human workers to fill. Monitoring grain silos, at very least, qualifies for the first part.

Today at Disrupt, the Edinburgh, Scotland-based company debuted its robotic solution. It’s a small, American football-shaped robot designed to essentially swim inside of a grain silo to offer farmers a better insight into the environmental conditions. Temperature and humidity can have a profound impact on grain storage, and the wrong environmental conditions can lead farmers to destroy significant portions of crop storage.

The Crover robot is design to offer a much more complete and targeted analysis of grain storage than traditional static methods. The robot lives inside the silo and dives into its contents when it’s time to offer analysis.  All of that information is fed into a dashboard, offering farmers a more complete picture of what’s happening inside.

Image Credits: Clover

Future versions of the robot will be designed to potentially help address some of these issues, but for now, at least, it’s up to the silo owner to take care of the environmental issues when the robot has identified them.

The robot will be offered through a Hardware as a Service subscription model, running farmers around £3,000 (just under $4,000) per robot, per year. The price includes the hardware and software solution. It sounds pricey, especially for a system that requires one robot per silo of grain, but Crover says that grain loss can often cost groups around £24,000 ($32,000) a year.

Crover is still quite a small team, with six full-time and one part-time employee, but the company is poised to start growing after two years. Thus far, its funds have primarily come from grants and bootstrapping. Even so, it currently has two robots being piloted at sites in the U.K. (Scotland and England) and a fair amount of interest from other locations in Europe, including Spain and Italy.

The company is currently shooting for a product launch in May of next year.

Severe droughts have drained rivers and reservoirs across parts of India, and more than half a billion people in the world’s second-most populous nation are estimated to run out of drinking water by 2030.

Signs of this are apparent in farms, which consume the vast majority of total water supplies. Farmers have been struggling in India to grow crops, as they are still heavily reliant on rainwater. Those with means have shifted to grow crops such as pearl millet, cow peas, bottle gourd and corn — essentially anything but rice — that use a fraction of the water. But most don’t have this luxury.

If that wasn’t enough, Indian cities are facing another challenge: The level of harmful chemicals used in vegetables has gone up significantly over the years.

A Hyderabad-headquartered startup, which is competing in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield this week, thinks it has found a way to address both of these challenges.

Across many of its centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore that look like spaceships from the inside, UrbanKisaan is growing crops, stacked one on top of another.

Vertical farming, a concept that has gained momentum in some Western markets, is still very new in India.

The model brings with it a range of benefits. Vihari Kanukollu, the co-founder and chief executive of UrbanKisaan, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup does not use any soil or harmful chemicals to grow crops and uses 95% less water compared to traditional farms.

“We have built a hydroponic system that allows water to keep flowing and get recycled again and again,” he said. Despite using less water, UrbanKisaan says it produces 30% more crops. “We grow to at least 30-40 feet of height. And it has an infinite loop there,” he said.

Kanukollu, 26, said that unlike other vertical farming models, which only grow lettuce and basil, UrbanKisaan has devised technology to grow over 50 varieties of vegetables.

The bigger challenge for UrbanKisaan was just convincing businesses like restaurant chains to buy from it. “Despite us offering much healthier vegetables, businesses still prefer to go with traditionally grown crops and save a few bucks,” he said.

So to counter it, UrbanKisaan sells directly to consumers. Visitors can check in to centres of UrbanKisaan in Hyderabad and Bangalore and buy a range of vegetables.

The startup, backed by Y Combinator and recently by popular South Indian actress Samantha Akkineni, also sells kits for about $200 that anyone can buy and grow vegetables in their own home.

Kanukollu, who has a background in commerce, started to explore the idea about UrbanKisaan in 2018 after being frustrated with not being able to buy fresh, pesticide-free vegetables for his mother, he said.

Luckily for him, he found Sairam Palicherla, a scientist who has spent more than two decades studying farming. The duo spent the first year in research and engaging with farmers.

Today, UrbanKisaan has more than 30 farms. All of these farms turned profitable in their first month, said Kanukollu.

“We are currently growing at 110% average month on month in sales and our average bill value has gone up by 10 times in the last 6 months,” he said.

The startup is also working on reaching a point within the next three months to achieve $150,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

The startup has spent the last few quarters further improving its technology stack. Kanukollu said they have cut down on power consumption from the LED lights by 50% and reduced the cost of manufacturing by 60% per tube.

Kanukollu said the startup works with five farmers currently and is working out ways to find a viable model to bring it to every farmer.

It is also developing a centralized intelligence atop convolutional neural networks to achieve real-time detection to find more harvestable produce, and detect deficiencies in the farm.

UrbanKisaan, which has raised about $1.5 million to date, plans to expand to more metro cities in the country in the coming quarters.

Perigee founder Mollie Breen used to work for NSA where she built a security solution to help protect the agency’s critical infrastructure. She spent the last two years at Harvard Business School talking to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and fine-tuning that idea she started at NSA into a commercial product.

Today, the solution that she built moves into public beta and will compete at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield with other startups for $100,000 and the Disrupt Cup.

Perigree helps protect things like heating and cooling systems or elevators that may lack patches or true security, yet are connected to the network in a very real way. It learns what normal behavior looks like from an operations system when it interacts with the network, such as what systems it interacts with and which individual employees tend to access it. It can then determine when something seems awry and stop an anomalous activity before it reaches the network. Without a solution like the one Breen has built, these systems would be vulnerable to attack.

“Perigee is a cloud-based platform that creates a custom firewall for every device on your network,” Breen told TechCrunch. “It learns each device’s unique behavior, the quirks of its operational environment and how it interacts with other devices to prevent malicious and abnormal usage while providing analytics to boost performance.”

Image Credits: Perigee

One of the key aspects of her solution is that it doesn’t require an agent, a small piece of software on the device, to make it work. Breen says this is especially important since that approach doesn’t scale across thousands of devices and can also introduce bugs from the agent itself. What’s more, it can use up precious resources on these devices if they can even support a software agent.

“Our sweet spot is that we can protect those thousands of devices by learning those nuances and we can do that really quickly, scaling up to thousands of devices with our generalized model because we take this agentless-based approach,” she said.

By creating these custom firewalls, her company is able to place security in front of the device preventing a hacker from using it as a vehicle to get on the network.

“One thing that makes us fundamentally different from other companies out there is that we sit in front of all of these devices as a shield,” she said. That essentially stops an attack before it reaches the device.

While Breen acknowledges that her approach can add a small bit of latency, it’s a tradeoff that CISOs have told her they are willing to make to protect these kinds of operational systems from possible attacks. Her system is also providing real-time status updates on how these devices are operating, giving them centralized device visibility. If there are issues found, the software recommends corrective action.

It’s still very early for her company, which Breen founded last year. She has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed capital. While Perigee is pre-revenue with just one employee, she is looking to add paying customers and begin growing the company as she moves into a wider public beta.

Perigee founder Mollie Breen used to work for NSA where she built a security solution to help protect the agency’s critical infrastructure. She spent the last two years at Harvard Business School talking to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and fine-tuning that idea she started at NSA into a commercial product.

Today, the solution that she built moves into public beta and will compete at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield with other startups for $100,000 and the Disrupt Cup.

Perigree helps protect things like heating and cooling systems or elevators that may lack patches or true security, yet are connected to the network in a very real way. It learns what normal behavior looks like from an operations system when it interacts with the network, such as what systems it interacts with and which individual employees tend to access it. It can then determine when something seems awry and stop an anomalous activity before it reaches the network. Without a solution like the one Breen has built, these systems would be vulnerable to attack.

“Perigee is a cloud-based platform that creates a custom firewall for every device on your network,” Breen told TechCrunch. “It learns each device’s unique behavior, the quirks of its operational environment and how it interacts with other devices to prevent malicious and abnormal usage while providing analytics to boost performance.”

Image Credits: Perigee

One of the key aspects of her solution is that it doesn’t require an agent, a small piece of software on the device, to make it work. Breen says this is especially important since that approach doesn’t scale across thousands of devices and can also introduce bugs from the agent itself. What’s more, it can use up precious resources on these devices if they can even support a software agent.

“Our sweet spot is that we can protect those thousands of devices by learning those nuances and we can do that really quickly, scaling up to thousands of devices with our generalized model because we take this agentless-based approach,” she said.

By creating these custom firewalls, her company is able to place security in front of the device preventing a hacker from using it as a vehicle to get on the network.

“One thing that makes us fundamentally different from other companies out there is that we sit in front of all of these devices as a shield,” she said. That essentially stops an attack before it reaches the device.

While Breen acknowledges that her approach can add a small bit of latency, it’s a tradeoff that CISOs have told her they are willing to make to protect these kinds of operational systems from possible attacks. Her system is also providing real-time status updates on how these devices are operating, giving them centralized device visibility. If there are issues found, the software recommends corrective action.

It’s still very early for her company, which Breen founded last year. She has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed capital. While Perigee is pre-revenue with just one employee, she is looking to add paying customers and begin growing the company as she moves into a wider public beta.

Tech’s coveted internships were some of the first roles to be cut as offices closed and businesses shuttered in response to the coronavirus. A number of companies across the country, including Glassdoor, StubHub, Funding Circle, Yelp, Checkr and even the National Institutes of Health, canceled their internship programs altogether.

For InsideSherpa co-founders Tom Brunskill and Pasha Rayan, the canceled internships were an opportunity. InsideSherpa, a Y Combinator graduate, hosts virtual work experience programs for college students all around the world.

College students, searching for a way to get job-ready, flocked to the platform from Northern Italy to South-East Asia, to all over the United States. Enrollments in InsideSherpa grew more than 86%, up to 1 million students.

The educational service successfully attracted student interest, and now, has landed investor interest. Today, InsideSherpa announced that it raised $9.3 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners . The startup has now raised $11.6 million in known venture funding. Other investors include FundersClub, Y Combinator and Arizona State University.

The financing will be used to grow InsideSherpa’s staff, with more engineering, product and sales roles. Along with the financing, InsideSherpa announced that it has rebranded to Forage.

Forage isn’t selling an internship replacement, but instead comes in one degree before the recruitment process. Students can go to the website and take a course from large companies such as Deloittee, Citi, BCG and GE. The course, designed in collaboration with the particular company and Forage, gives students a chance to “explore what a career would look like at their firm before the internship or entry-level application process opens,” Brunskill explains.

Forage is focused on partnering with large companies that employ upwards of 1,000 students per year via internships to help open up new pipelines. The corporate partners pay a subscription fee per year to post courses, and students can access all courses for free.

Popular courses include the KPMG Data Analytics Program, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Software Engineering Program and the Microsoft Engineering Program.

While Forage declined to disclose ARR, it confirmed that it was profitable heading into its fundraise, which formally closed in July.

Within edtech, flocks of companies have tried (and failed) to deliver on the promise of skills-based learning and employment opportunities as an outcome. The strategy of getting cozy with corporate partners isn’t unique to Forage, but the team views it as a competitive advantage. Of course, the effectiveness of that strategy matters more than the fact that it exists in the first place. Forage did not disclose efficacy information, but said that “some” corporate partners hired up to 52% of the cohort from their programs.

When Brunskill and Rayan first started Forage in 2017, they imagined a mentoring marketplace to connect students to young professionals. Three years later, much has changed.

“While students were interested in the product, they weren’t using it the way we intended,” he said. “Students kept saying to us ‘we just want an internship at company X, can you get me one?’ ”

While Brunskill doesn’t believe there’s any silver bullet solution to fixing education or recruitment systems, he remains optimistic in Forage’s future. After all, even if democratizing access to skills is the first step in a bigger race, it’s not an easy one.

Justin Kan and Robin Chan have each been angel investing for more than a decade. They’re starting a new fund together now, though, to stay involved as cofounders of more startups.

Goat Capital is a hybrid incubator versus a pure seed investment firm, Chan explains. It will be writing checks ranging between roughly half a million and $3 million dollars, and it is only planning to raise $40 million — so the checks will be selective.

The offering is that “you’re going to be working with Justin and Robin,” he says, as a direct collaboration to help your company succeed. With $25 million closed already from themselves and several family offices, the fund has begun investing globally with particular interests in digital health, ecommerce, digital entertainment and gaming, robotics and climate change.

The goal is not just about trying to be the Greatest Of All Time, Kan adds. In a startup, you “climb high heights and eat shit to get there. That tenacity is what we want.”

It’s a nod to their own successes and struggles as founders over the years, and what they have seen as investors and advisors to a wide range of companies around the world (Twitter, Xiaomi, Bird, Uber, Square, Ginkgo Bioworks, Scale.ai, Cruise, Razorpay, Xendit, Equipment Share, Wave, Teachable, Semantic Machines, Rippling, Built Robotics, etc.)

Kan was a cofounder of Justin.tv, which became Twitch as well as Socialcam. He later had an on-demand company called Exec and previously a calendar app called Kiko, both of which sold for small amounts. Most recently, he took a big shot at the traditional legal industry with Atrium, a law firm and legal software startup that raised big rounds of funding before shuttering earlier this year.

His prototype for Goat is Alto Pharmacy, a booming digital health unicorn today that the founders started in his living room.

“We do think founders should be treated like athletes, going for gold really hard… the Olympic metaphor,” Kan qualifies about the name. “That means grinding for years — and having to rest, too. I’m very passionate about mental health and wellness as part of the journey.” (More on that here.)

Chan, meanwhile, sold his gaming startup in China to Zynga a decade ago, then helped lead a failed attempt to buy Blackberry before founding Operator, a well-funded ecommerce company that closed a few years ago. During the pandemic, he helped create Operation Mask, a nonprofit that has been providing PPE across the US. He’s also an ongoing advisor to Sleeper, Bird, Expa and Flipboard.

The focus will be fully global now. Chan explains that even though you’re seeing more challenges to building a truly global company these days, there’s more space for local startups to win big.

“There’s the US internet, the China internet, the India internet, the EU internet — in some ways it makes those markets more valuable to win, like traditional media. Broadcast and cable are highly geographic but the franchise value becomes higher because of the regulatory moat.”

Chan, on that note, met Kan back when he was a director at Verizon Wireless, when Justin.tv was trying to negotiate for free data. When I asked if they had worked out a deal during a phone interview, Kan said “you [expletive] didn’t.]”

But it did lead to other co-investments later on, including Ramp, Workstream and others, and now this fund.

Today, Kan says that the focus on teams will be as flexible as the times. “When we started, the internet was America,” he says. “If you weren’t there, you weren’t a company. It’s been a complete reversal of that. Now teams are international, talent is international, more and more companies are building remote first — although you’d seen that before given the costs of the Bay. We have an entirely remote company in North Carolina, Grammarly in Europe… it’s more and more the norm. Smart founders are going anywhere to find talent.

For the two partners, this new fund will be about staying connected to that certain startup feeling that is elusive for anyone trying to build something great.

“There’s nothing more magical than being in the first step of a special company,” Chan says. “That glimpse of the future. We wouldn’t get the same feeling at the growth stage versus working with small teams or a single founder. I think we have the instinct.”

Facebook this morning announced a series of new rules designed to further penalize those who violate its Community Standards, specifically around Facebook Groups. It also introduced rules meant to crack down on the spread of misinformation through these more private networks. The changes will impact those who had helped lead groups that were later banned and members who participated in them. The rules will also remove some of the more potentially harmful groups from Facebook’s Group recommendations, among other things.

Facebook’s existing recidivism policy was meant to prevent people from creating new groups similar to those that were banned for violating its Community Standards. However, the rule had only applied to Group admins. Now, Facebook says both admins and moderators alike will not be able to create any new groups for “a period of time” after their group had been banned for a policy violation. Facebook tells us this period is 30 days. If after the 30 days, the admin or moderator tries to create another violating group, they’ll be again paused for 30 days.

In addition, Group members who had any Community Standards violation in a group will now require post approval for the next 30 days. That means all their posts will have to be pre-approved by a Group admin or moderator. This could help larger groups deal with those whose behavior is often flagged, but it could also overwhelm groups with a large number of users. And Facebook says if the admins or moderators then approve a post that violates Community Standards, the group will be removed.

Facebook will also require Groups have an active admin. Often admins get busy and step down or leave their group. Facebook will now attempt to identify groups where an admin is not involved and proactively suggest admin roles to members who may be interested. You may have already received notifications from some of your Groups that an admin is needed. If so, it’s because Facebook identified you as someone who has the potential to lead the group, because you don’t have a history of violations.

The company will begin to archive groups without an active admin in the weeks ahead, it said. When admins leave and no one else assumes the admin role, the group will be archived.

This change could help to crack down on the unmoderated flow of information across groups, which can lead to spam and misinformation spreading quickly. It is helpful to have direct moderation, as other forum sites like Reddit have shown, but it’s often not enough. Group culture, too, can help to encourage certain types of content — including content that violates Facebook’s rules — and admins are often willing participants in that.

Another change will impact which Groups are suggested to users.

Facebook says health groups will no longer be recommended, as “it’s crucial that people get their health information from authoritative sources,” the company said.

Unfortunately, this change alone can only mitigate the danger of misleading health information, but does little to actually stop it. Because health groups can still be found via Search, users will be able to easily surface groups that fit their beliefs, even when those beliefs are actively harmful to themselves or to others.

There are, today, a large number of groups that continue to spread misleading health information or push users to try alternative or untested cures. These group participants may have the “right” to have these discussions online, at least in Facebook’s view, but there’s disagreement on whether or not the groups should be allowed the same search billing and discoverability as more expert-led resources.

For instance, if you search Facebook today for vaccines, Facebook will gladly point you to several large groups that tell you not to get one. By doing so, Facebook has effectively taken away medical experts’ and doctors’ authority on health-related matters and handed it over to the general public. Multiply this at the scale of Facebook’s billions of users and across all subject matters, and it’s easy to see why simply not “recommending” some groups barely makes a dent.

Facebook is also tweaking its rules to reduce the spread of groups tied to violence. It already removes them from recommendations, restricts them from search, and in the near future, it says it will reduce their content in News Feed. These groups are also removed if they use veiled language and symbols in an attempt to avoid being flagged. Recently, 790 groups linked to QAnon were removed under this policy, Facebook said.

This change, however, comes too little, too late. QAnon, left unchecked for years, has tapped into the mainstream consciousness and is now involving people who may not even realize they’re being manipulated by QAnon-driven initiatives.

Then there is the not-small matter of whether Facebook can actually enforce the rules it comes up with. A quick glance at Facebook search results for QAnon indicate it cannot. It may have removed 790 QAnon groups, but after scrolling for a couple of minutes we couldn’t even reach the bottom of group search results for QAnon content. And they weren’t anti-QAnon groups.

That demonstrates that much of Facebook’s work in this area is performative, rather than effective. A one-time sweep of harmful groups is not the same as dedicating resources and personnel to the task of pushing these dangerous, fringe movements, violence-prone organizers, or anti-medical science believers to the edges of society — a position they once held back in the offline, unconnected era. Today’s Facebook gives these groups access to all the same tools to organize as anyone else, and only limits their spread in dribs and drabs over time.

For instance, Facebook’s policy on groups ties to violence practically contradicts itself. It claims to remove groups discussing violence, but simultaneously includes a number of rules about limiting these same groups in recommendations and downranking them in search. That indicates even Facebook understands it can’t remove these groups in a timely fashion.

People disagree whether Facebook’s role should involve moderating this sort of content or to what extent any this should be protected as “free speech.” But Facebook never really took a moral position here or argued that it’s not a governmental body, so it can make its own rules based on what it stands for. Instead, it built out massive internet infrastructure where content moderation has been an afterthought and a job to be outsourced to the less fortunate. Now Facebook wants accolades for its clean-up work, before it even effectively solves the problems it has created.

Threads is not your average startup and, really, it’s not a startup anymore. It’s over 10 years old, employs more than 150 people, and successfully bridged the Series A gap in Europe closing a round of $20M back in 2018. And so far, it’s surviving 2020. 

COVID-19 has put retail – and the rest of us – on a rollercoaster. For some it’s minted millions with captive audiences realizing that they really, really hate that couch and it’s finally time to replace it. For others, like Neiman Marcus, J.C. Penney, and J. Crew, it’s meant bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings for 2020 are clocking in at 424, according to S&P Global, and look on track to upset the total filings in 2010. 

Threads finds itself heartily in the black on this one.

“We’ve definitely had a challenging year. When we look at Threads business model we’re set up to respond very quickly and we have had a strong year. We’re very much in the luxury sector, we specialize in the luxury clientele and we have not seen a decline in our existing customers,” Threads Founder and CEO Sophie Hill explains.

Despite predicting slower growth, Threads is actually attracting new customers many of whom have been hesitant to make the jump into digital, proving that the luxury market, and customer, is as robust as ever, “We have seen customers purchasing goods at our higher value price points which is actually down to the fact that the stores are closed.” 

While this might be the final nail in the coffin of brick-and-mortar retail, it’s bigger than that.

“People have been forced to go online, who might not have gone there as a first choice. Many people have found it easier than expected and a real lifeline in lockdown. I think that will hugely change trends,” Hill says. With an evermore competitive retail market, what can help brands stand out? 

For Threads, it’s all about the customer. That means meeting them where they are, be it WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram (though we’ve yet to see the brand appear on TikTok) and delivering a seamless customer experience that centers on two key values: convenience and personalization. Above all, agility breeds resilience. 

Learn what channels are showing high engagement, the discovery process for new platforms poised to take the market, and strategies retailers both big and small can use to stay ahead of the curve in the interview below.