Shopify has acquired Threads.com, a Slack alternative backed by Sequoia, according to a statement on Threads’ website, the deal’s terms remain undisclosed, but the Threads team will be joining Shopify
Threads further stated that the startup had “the opportunity to sell our domains” following the debut of Meta’s social network with the same name last year.
The note does not specify whether the startup sold the domain name to Meta, Shopify, or any other entity; however, it does suggest that it would have been required to rebrand from Threads if it had remained independent.
We have attempted to contact each of these organizations and will revise the narrative following any response.
In 2019, Threads.com introduced its product in stealth mode with $10.5 million in funding. It was brought to public attention following the introduction of Threads, Meta’s social network, which is similar to Twitter.
It is worth noting that Meta also had another product called Threads, an Instagram companion app launched in 2019 and discontinued in 2021.
According to the Threads.com team, Meta’s social network was experiencing growth at the time, and several corporations expressed interest in acquiring the startup. It ultimately selected Shopify, it stated, due to the “opportunity to experiment at scale.”
“Around the same time [when Threads.com was considering selling the domain], a handful of companies approached us, wondering if we would be open to an acquisition. When this happened in the past, we would politely decline. However, this time, things were different,” the company said in the post. “We weren’t that excited about the time it would take to invest in a rebrand, and with mind-warping technological advances now being a commodity, we were excited about joining a place where we could tinker at scale.”
Meta elected to utilize Threads.net last year because Threads, a business communication startup, already possessed Threads.com.
Nevertheless, numerous customers continued to access the.com website and even downloaded the startup’s application before they realized it differed from the social network they sought.
Data from analytics firm data.ai at the time indicated that Threads.com’s app had received 880,000 downloads globally on iOS alone between July 6 and July 12.
The app achieved one million lifetime downloads on Android, with only a few downloads ahead of the introduction of Meta’s Threads social network.
“Threads is a term that is both powerful and native to the internet,” stated Rousseau Kazi, the co-founder and CEO of Threads, in a statement released to TechCrunch last year. Kazi previously worked at Facebook for six years.
“The most effective method of maintaining communication with your [.net]work or [.com]pany is to utilize threads on a variety of platforms.” As a result, it is unsurprising that Meta selected a potent label to symbolize their approach to constructing the town square.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke warmly greeted Kazi and his team, but he did not provide further details regarding the company’s plans to integrate the product into Shopify.
