Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Sequoia-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website. The companies did not disclose terms of the deal, but said the Threads.com team will join Shopify.
Threads added that after the launch of Meta’s social network of the same name last year, the startup had “an opportunity to sell our domains.” It’s unclear whether the startup sold the domain name to Meta, Shopify, or anyone else, but the note suggests it would have to rebrand from Threads if it remained independent. We’ve reached out to all of these companies and will update this story if we hear back.
Threads.com launched its product out of stealth in 2019 with $10.5 million in funding. It came to prominence after Meta launched Threads, its Twitter-like social network. Notably, Meta also had another product called Threads, an Instagram companion app that launched in 2019 and shut down in 2021.
The Threads.com team said that while Meta’s social network was on the rise, a few companies approached the startup about acquiring it. Ultimately, he chose Shopify, he said, for the opportunity to “experiment at scale.”
“About 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,” the company said in the post on its homepage. “When this happened in the past, we would politely decline. However, this time things were different. We weren’t that excited about the time it would take to invest in a rebrand, and with mind-warping technological advancements now a commodity, we were excited to be part of a place where we could bite at scale.”
Last year, Meta chose to use Threads.net because Threads, the business communications startup, already owned Threads.com. However, many customers still visited the .com site and even downloaded the startup’s app before realizing it wasn’t the social network they were looking for.
According to data from analytics firm data.ai at the time, Threads.com’s app had 880,000 downloads worldwide on iOS alone between July 6 and July 12. And on Android, the app crossed the 1 million lifetime download mark just a few downloads before Meta launched its Threads social network.
“Threads is a powerful word and a native term on the web,” Threads Co-Founder and CEO Russo Kaziwho worked at Facebook for six years, said in a statement issued to TechCrunch last year.
“Threading — across platforms — is the best way to stay connected to your [.net]work or [.com]cloth. Given this, it’s no surprise that Meta chose a strong label to represent their take on the construction of the town square.”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke welcomed Kazi and his team, but didn’t elaborate on how he plans to integrate the product into Shopify.
