Announcing Threado's $3.1M seed round led by Vertex Ventures and our public launch

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My love for communities was inspired by my work at Zomato. I was an early Zoman and VP of Marketing at Zomato for 8+ years and had the opportunity to help build and replicate our content and community playbook across markets.

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In every city, we would meet hundreds of early adopters 1:1 to get to know them personally, understand their pain points, incorporate their feedback into the product, enable them to connect with each other, recognize the most active contributors and do so much more to help members add value to each other! At our peak, we had 35 community managers doing this across the globe at a time when community building was not a buzzword. There were no tools around so we built internal dashboards to make sense of all the activity and quantify the impact. It took anywhere between 6-18 months to build an organically engaging community in a city. It was a lot of hard work and doing things that don’t scale but at the end of the day content and community-led growth formed the backbone of Zomato’s growth flywheel.

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The last few years have seen the rise of the ‘community manager’ as a must-have role across companies – both large and small. They play a key role in enhancing the brand and product experience by nurturing champions, enabling connections, providing the best support, curating relevant content, creating experiences, and that’s just scratching the surface. Community builders deserve all the unfair advantages but today’s tools cater largely to the decision makers and not to the ones who are in the trenches. There are millions of communities across Discord, Slack, Facebook, Telegram, Whatsapp, and over 300+ community tools. Yet, engagement data is in silos, there’s no easy way to understand member needs, managing a community involves manual workflows, and it is difficult to quantify the overall impact.

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“I love logging into multiple dashboards every day.” - said no community builder ever.

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I moved on from Zomato in 2019 and during my professional break, experimented with several ideas and eventually started Threado as a passion project just after the pandemic in 2020 to solve this problem. Shalini soon joined the journey as our first employee and after a few months of tinkering with the initial avatar of Threado, I met my Co-founder, Abhishek Nalin. Abhishek and I are fascinated with the potential of online communities and have a firm belief in the future of community-led growth. We believe that in a world where products are commoditized, building a community is a core differentiator.

At Threado, we want to empower and champion community builders in every way we can and we’d love to see millions of businesses grow through the power of community. And today, we are taking the first steps toward achieving our vision. Abhishek, I, and the rest of the Threado Team are super excited to bring you three major announcements:

1. Our seed round of $3.1 Million

Our seed round was led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India with participation from Gemba Capital, Speciale Invest, and PointOne Capital.

The round also saw participation from over 30 angel investors including Deepinder Goyal (Founder & CEO, Zomato), Pankaj Chaddah (Co-founder, Shyft, Zomato), Krish Subramanian, and Rajaraman Santhanam (Co-founders of Chargebee), Abhishek Goyal (Co-founder, Tracxn), Aneesh Reddy (Co-founder, Capillary Technologies), Tonmoy Shingal (Co-founder, Mettl), Archana Priyadarshini (GP, PointOne Capital), Sri Rajan (Ex-MD, Bain India) and several other marquee angel investors. A huge thank you to all of them for supporting us and being there during the early phase of our journey.

2. Threado is now out of beta and open for everyone

Threado is the command center for community builders like you. We’ve built an amazingly powerful and actionable dashboard that goes far beyond measuring engagement analytics. Integrate your Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, or GitHub and:

• Know who's engaged, who needs a nudge, tag members, create custom member cohorts, and personalize your interactions at scale
• Automate all your operational tasks with ease using our visual workflow builder
• View, manage your activity feed, and respond to unanswered queries in the community

Here’s a trailer you don’t want to miss!

But don’t just take our word for it! Over the last few months, we’ve been co-building Threado with community leaders from some of the fastest-growing community-led companies. We wouldn’t be here without them and here’s what they say about us. https://wall.shoutout.so/threado

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3. We are going live on Product Hunt on 2nd August!

Looking forward to your support and feedback on Product Hunt. Follow us at @ThreadoHQ to stay tuned for the latest updates.

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Where are we headed to next?

Everything we do is focused on empowering community builders. Our ambition is to define and shape this category over the coming years. We are on a mission to help every business grow through the power of community and want to power community-led growth for 10 million businesses by 2030. Join us in our journey, come be a part of our community.

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Abhishek, Sharath, and I also had a chance to get on the Build in Public podcast hosted by KP which touches upon our origin story of Threado, key inflection points, the announcements, our roadmap, and what’s next. Watch the full recording here:

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Meet our team - the folks making it happen!

We are super-proud to be working alongside some of the most authentic people. We are a 25-member remote team with folks who've helped build and scale organizations like Zomato, Freshworks, Product Hunt, On Deck, Flipkart, Capgemini, Innovacer, Yellow.ai, and more. Today is an important milestone for us and that would not have been possible without the efforts of these wonderful people.

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Gratitude to our earliest supporters

Threado wouldn’t be here without the support from our customers, investors, angels, people who we have collaborated with, and several others. Special thanks to:

• Shishir Dash and Anshul Sao have been bouncing boards from before Threado and investing in us!
• Harpreet Grover for being the first customer of Threado’s MVP and now an Angel. Also to NSRCEL for being our early partners.
• Suhas Motwani (The Product Folks) and Sri (Rocketlane) for being the earliest partners and then investing in us.
• Kevin William David, also an angel, for being a bouncing board over the last couple of years
• Abhishek Goyal and Adith (Gemba Capital) for being our earliest backers
• Vishal Gupta for meeting serendipitously, backing us and connecting us to Vertex Ventures
• Stoa School for being Threado's first beta testers
• Accel's SeedToScale program’s team for being there in the earliest days
• Michael Novotny for the amazing side projects we’ve collaborated on over the last year
• Dhvanil for helping with the designs for the first version of Threado
• OnDeck for being an amazing community that has supported us through our journey
• Ryan Roberts, Spice Route Legal, Aeka Advisors, and Sartha Advisors for patiently handling several of our requests on an ongoing basis

We are just getting started,

Pramod, Abhishek, and the rest of the Threado Team!

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