Thread, the Kiwi martech platform big brands couldn’t wait for, goes live

One of modern marketing’s biggest problems has just been solved with the launch of Kiwi startup, Thread. Backed by some of the country’s best-known brands, Thread promises to turn every marketing campaign, result and lesson into marketing intelligence on demand, and DB Breweries, FreshChoice, ANZCO foods, and Metlifecare are on board from day one.

Marketers have never had more data at their fingertips, and now they have one place to make every bit of it count. Picture walking into a Monday morning meeting, asking your marketing lead what the team did last month and why it worked (or failed), and getting an answer drawn from everything your business has ever run. That is the working life Thread is promising, and its first customers are already living it.

Thread, the work of Auckland-based advertising veterans Troy Fuller and Phil Newman, officially launched at the start of September, giving marketers something the profession has never had – a single source of truth where every campaign, every dollar invested, every result and every hard-won lesson lives on, compounds, and answers back.

For Fuller, the launch is the answer to a problem he spent twenty years watching nobody solve. Across agencies in New Zealand, Australia and London, the same pattern repeated. Campaigns went into market, results came back, and the insight evaporated, buried on a server, trapped in a deck, or locked in the head of someone who had already left the building.

“Maybe one percent of campaigns end up in a post-campaign report, and one hundred percent of that one percent ends up in a PowerPoint presentation,” Fuller says. “Those insights get used for a week or two and then they’re lost, never referred to again. As someone working inside an agency, it was frustrating to have nothing to point at and say, more often than not, when you do X, you’re going to get Y. Too often that’s left to intuition.”

That frustration might have stayed exactly that, were it not for a curious coincidence about a year ago. Within weeks of each other, two clients came to Fuller with the same request: we need to start tracking our marketing activity, would you mind looking over this spreadsheet? Staring at those spreadsheets, he reached a simple conclusion. In a world of exponentially improving AI, there had to be a better way.

The first person he called was Newman, who had spent fifteen years in advertising on the production, operations and optimisation side before falling in love with the SaaS world at a tech startup. What began as a small side product for one of Fuller’s agencies quickly outgrew that ambition as the pair validated the idea with potential users.

“What started as something quite simple and elegant became a bit of a snowball,” Newman says. “The amount of work that’s gone in behind the scenes is exactly what makes it a simple, elegant solution for our clients.”

The result is what the founders call marketing’s system of record, uniting what marketing has always kept apart. Thread’s AI chat sits across both the hard data (investment, sales performance, objectives and KPIs) and the contextual richness that usually dies in a deck, such as strategy, creative choices and lessons learned, turning years of scattered activity into answers on demand.

Crucially, the founders point out that AI is only as good as the framework beneath it. Thread’s proprietary structure works for any marketer, any business and any campaign, online or offline, and it solves a trust problem the pair believe generic AI cannot.

“You can plug AI into your company server, but AI is a probability engine,” Fuller says. “It will grab the file it thinks is correct from an environment full of contradictions and surface a really confident answer that’s probably wrong. It only takes one incorrect answer for a marketer to lose trust. That’s why a structured framework, from which AI extracts only the relevant and correct data points, is the most important part of what we’ve built.”

Getting there took more late nights and whiteboards than anticipated, but the graft shows in the launch roster. DB Breweries provided valuable input during early development, helping shape the platform. ANZCO Foods is bringing its Angel Bay brand onto Thread, FreshChoice supermarkets is coming aboard, and the founders recently signed aged care provider Metlifecare. That last deal carries particular weight. The founders pitched cold to the new client and agreed within a week, validation built on the product alone.

Onboarding, Newman notes, is deliberately painless. Clients are up and running within a day, dropping existing briefs, media schedules and agency documents into the platform, which maps everything into Thread’s framework automatically.

Bootstrapped to date, the pair are in the early stages of a capital raise, with more customer announcements coming. They make no secret of their ambition to follow Kiwi martech successes like Tracksuit and Ideally, gaining traction on both sides of the Tasman, an Auckland headquarters with a presence in Australia, then the world.

For now, Fuller is keeping his feet on the floor, guided by a philosophy sharpened by a year of ups and downs.

“There are bumps in the road every single day, and you’ve got to be relentless. Don’t let the great moments lift you too high, and don’t let the tough moments bring you down toomuch. Stay as level as possible, keep dropping the shoulder, and keep moving forward.”

Interview by Sam Collins