So long, Tracx.

That's it. No farewell post. No goodbye email. Just a redirect.

Tracx has discontinued operations.

Talkwalker, the global leader in advanced listening & AI-powered social media analytics, is here to help with your social listening needs.

So long, Tracx.

Started in my garage in 2006. Officially launched in 2008.

The idea was simple: listening to what people say online is important and valuable. That hunch turned out to be right. We were just a little early, a little under-resourced, and made plenty of mistakes along the way.

Five co-founders. Went through four CEOs.

Three rebranding exercises.

Five financing rounds, raising a total of over $40M. Investors who believed in us along the way: Revel Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Edison Partners, and Camden Partners.

Around 100 employees at the peak. Offices in New York, Tel Aviv, and London.

Two acquisitions that fell through. Both at the last minute.

The clients were real. Tier 1. Brands that actually mattered.

Coca-Cola. L'Oreal. Fox. Kraft Foods. BMW. Canon. Rolex. Apple. Sears. Royal Bank of Scotland. Comcast. The New York Times. Disney. IKEA. Ford. SXSW. Super Bowl.

Drinking from the Twitter firehose. Huge MySQL and MongoDB clusters.
A custom real-time Big Data pipeline before that was a thing anyone talked about.

Two data centers. Hundreds of servers.

Along the way, some recognition: Forrester Wave Strong Performer, Best in Biz Gold, CIOReview Top Data Analytics Company 2013, CIOReview Top Big Data Company 2014, Forbes Top 100 Analytics Firm, AlwaysOn OnMedia Top 100, Red Herring Top 100 North America, Shorty, Deloitte Fast 500, IAB Mixx, Stevies, Digiday Signal Awards.

I learned a lot building Tracx. What to do, but more importantly, what not to do.

About building a product, scaling a team, raising money, pivoting, hiring and managing people, capacity planning, ops, site reliability, cost of doing business.

The social media analytics space got very competitive. Platforms closed the gates. Regulations changed. The market consolidated. We didn't make it to the other side.

I left when I ran out of hope. It took two more years until it finally reached the end of the road.