In 2009, Needle’s founder, Morgan Lynch, was shopping online for a triathlon wetsuit. He didn’t know much about these wetsuits, but knew he wanted one that would help him perform his best. Morgan spent hours traversing search engines, reading through forums and scouring product reviews to find the best choice. After wasting too much time online, he finally gave up and went to a local store where he purchased one for $400.
Morgan realized there were dozens of triathlon experts to be found online that would have loved to share their knowledge, but he couldn’t access them in real-time. Based on his experience from Logoworks, his previous company, Morgan knew he could get the right people motivated and working from the cloud.
Needle was born.
Needle is about giving consumers the ability to find the perfect item online at the right time. It’s about using precise expert information to give consumers guidance. It’s about increasing the efficiency of the online shopping experience and moving the Needle for e-commerce sites.
Needle goes beyond the offerings of basic chat software companies. It’s about recreating the in-store shopping experience online. Needle provides so much more than contact centers, call centers, outsourcers and nearshorers that simply provide bodies. None of these options help e-commerce sites access the best and most knowledgeable people and arm them with the right sales tools in a scalable and sustainable way. Needle can.
Needle is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Needle’s management team knows how to scale workforces in the cloud, and deliver compelling enterprise solutions.
Needle raised $2 Million in a series A round in early 2011. Individual investors include industry veterans such as Josh James (Omniture, Domo), Jeff Kearl (Logoworks, Stance), Kathy Schlein (Apple), Russ Fradin (Flycast, Comscore, Adify), Mike Levinthal (Mayfield, TWVP), Matt Mickiewicz (99Designs), Mark Harbottle (99Designs), Larry Braitman (Flycast, Adify), Eric Groves (Constant Contact) and others. Lightbank Ventures (Groupon, Beachmint) also participated.