So it’s a pretty exciting week for us here at twine.  Not only are we sharing some news around funding and a gorgeous new product release, but we are doing so from MPI WEC in Las Vegas; our team’s first in person event in more than a year!

Here are the details on some of our recent news:

• 🚀 New Funding! We’ve raised another $3.3M in venture funding, bringing us to a total of $4.7M in seed investment.  Our round was led by Moment Ventures, with participation from Coelius Capital, AltaIR Capital, AltaClub, Mentors Fund, Rosecliff Ventures, and Bloom Venture Partners.  Clint Chao, founding Partner at Moment, will join our board of directors. I’ve known both Clint and  Zach Coelius for a long time, and there’s a lot of mutual trust there.
• 🎁 New Product!  We have a significant new product release hitting the market soon; our “Cyber Café” release.  There are a bunch of goodies in here including a brand new DeepTalk design, customized room templates, and the big one, the ability to run serendipitous networking sessions of up to 5 people in a single networking room. We are slowly building out a suite of networking experiences that will elegantly meet a broad range of use cases.
• 🤝 New People!  Finally, we’ve made a number of key hires: CTO, Head of Design, Head of Community Engagement, Head of Global Accounts - all folks we have worked with before, or admired from afar.  We do have two more founding team seats open still; Customer Success (#eventprofs, I’m looking at you), and first Sales Rep.

With plenty of runway, an amazing team, and a shiny new product release, we are fired up to continue our mission of sparking new professional networks that matter.

Where we started

As some of you know, we started as a consumer facing app seeking to end loneliness, in the throes of the pandemic.  We learned a ton during the process, running up to 15 public twines per day; I personally met hundreds of people around the world on our product who aligned with our mission, and during the course of thousands and thousands of conversations powered, the product got tighter and better.

But then we started to feel an intense pull from the events industry, which was going through a sudden digital transformation as a trillion dollar industry raced online, almost overnight.  

Our roots run deep in events, and it’s a domain that we understand deeply; we’ve always loved the electricity, serendipity, and palpable energy of a well run event.  

We began testing twine for private groups, and we liked what we saw.  Net Promoter Score was through the roof on these experiences; it turns out that the magic of twine was even more intense when it was like minded folks coming together.

So in December, 2020, we shifted the business to serve the events industry full force.

Where we are today

And what a time it is to be building for event professionals!  

Over the past 15 months, the event industry has experienced a once in a lifetime transformation driven by Covid shutdowns.  With the worst of the pandemic (hopefully) behind us, as an industry we enter the next chapter with new skills, new tools, and a hybrid future.

An enormous, 1000 year old industry is now dramatically reinventing itself, and the future is bright as in person events come roaring back, complemented by the enhanced reach, accessibility, and measurement of virtual events.

I suspect our industry is about to go through its 10x moment.

Networking and human connection have never been more critical for our industry (and the world), and digital networking has the potential to be far more efficient and impactful than in person, due to the power of matchmaking software, and the removal of location as a constraint.

In this context, twine’s near term path is clear.  

We want to be the simplest, fastest, highest impact way for event owners to add compelling attendee networking to their events.

We are platform agnostic, and will happily work with any (event) technology stack, from Zoom, to Microsoft Teams, to Hubb, to Bizzabo, to Splash.

We enable our customers to spin up networking rooms in minutes, and to easily append those networking experiences to their core system via link or embed code.  

While we are working mostly with corporate customers today, we are also quite interested in exploring more persistent use cases around remote work, associations, and communities.

There may come a day that we narrow our focus, today we are quite horizontal in terms of use cases; anything from speed networking, to new hire onboarding, to digital watercooler is squarely in our wheelhouse.  

We are thankful every day for the trust of our early customers, and the learnings that they are providing us.

Where we are headed

We have great clarity on the impact that we want to make on the world:

Our mission is to spark conversations that accelerate professional and personal growth.

We believe that professional networks have an enormous impact on opportunity, happiness, and wellbeing.

And frankly, the current state of the world is not fair; many networks are gifted based on the family you were born into, the neighborhood that you grew up in, and the schools that you attend. For more on this thesis, see James Currier’s excellent piece “Your Life is Driven by Network Effects.”

Democratizing network access is a huge undertaking, with world changing implications.  We are excited to go deep in this space.

Looking around the landscape of business applications, there are many ways to stay in touch with the people you already know; Linkedin, Zoom, and Slack to name a few.  But there are shockingly few ways to meet folks that are not already in your network.

I am thrilled with our progress to date. We plan to continue to work closely with event owners, community leaders, and associations to help them bring compelling networking experiences to their communities.

Down the road we have some big ideas for how to increase our reach, and we look forward to sharing our plans in more detail as things progress.

So, to wrap this up and recap:

• 🚀   We’ve brought in another $3.3M, bringing us to a total of $4.7M in seed investment.
• 🎁   We have a significant new product release hitting the market soon; our “Cyber Café” release.
• 🤝    We have two more founding team seats open still; Customer Success (#eventprofs, I’m looking at you), and first Sales Rep. So if ya know of anyone...reach out at lawrence@twine.nyc.

Look forward to seeing you MPI WEC in Las Vegas 🤙