Clyde - Tech Startup of the Year
Company: Clyde
Company Description: Clyde is a product protection platform empowering retailers to offer their customers extended warranties and accident protection, helping to grow average order value and drive customer loyalty. Clyde helps retailers stay customer focused—with a portfolio of administrative partners, a seamless customer experience, and smart contract matching—we make product protection simple and intuitive.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Tech Startup of the Year- Software
Nomination Title: Clyde
Clyde is an extended warranty platform that integrates into the tech stack of merchants, enabling them to earn additional revenue and offer a seamless experience to their customers. Clyde’s platform services merchants both small and large with plug-ins available for major eCommerce platforms and a robust API that can be tapped into for complex implementations. Customers are able to add protection and file claims through a customer portal, and they also have the ability to add protection after their product purchase.
Clyde’s founder, Brandon Gell, was working for a startup that was designing and selling a technical 3D scanner — but he couldn’t find an insurance partner to offer product protection online. He recognized that if he couldn’t find a partner, many other merchants were likely facing the same problem. This shortcoming was damaging to merchants’ credibility with their customers and it also removed a valuable source of revenue. Thus, the idea for Clyde was born.
At the beginning of 2019, Clyde was a year old company with five employees. Clyde is now a rapidly growing team with fifty employees across the country. Over the past two years, Clyde has worked with 200+ merchants, including SharkNinja, Molekule, Vaio, and Tuft & Needle, and due to Clyde, these merchants have sold 100,000+ extended warranty plans.
In April 2020, Clyde raised $14 million in Series A funding led by top VC firm, Spark Capital. With this funding, Clyde has invested heavily in product and engineering in order to create a robust warranty platform for merchants.
Clyde has built integrations with four eCommerce platforms over the past two years. Merchants can implement a warranty program within one day with Clyde. Launching a warranty program is typically a cumbersome process and available to large merchants like Best Buy and Amazon. To this day, most warranty programs are managed in a low-tech way, with merchants sending order CSVs to insurance partners each month. With Clyde, all warranty orders live in a single dashboard, which provides merchants access to real-time analytics to optimize their programs.
Clyde’s brand has generated significant word of mouth traffic, resulting in half of Clyde’s merchant partners coming to the company organically.
Clyde set out to bring the warranty industry into the 21st century. The product warranty industry has seen very little innovation over the past 50 years—neither for merchants or consumers. Just the word “warranty” typically leaves a bad taste in consumers’ mouths, since terms and conditions and filing a claim are confusing and difficult.
Building a warranty program was impossible for merchants doing less than hundreds of millions in annual revenue, as insurance companies will not partner with smaller merchants. With Clyde’s integrations, merchants can launch a product protection in hours.
With Clyde, merchants receive access to pricing that is typically reserved for Fortune 10 companies, a platform to manage and optimize their program, and performance that typically exceeds, by more than 4x, the industry standard.
Consumers get transparent terms and conditions, a dashboard to manage their contracts and add protection to orders they initially passed on, and instant adjudication and resolutions. Gone are the days in which consumers need a paper receipt to file a warranty claim.
With Clyde’s eCommerce integrations, merchants of all sizes can now launch a profitable eCommerce warranty program in a day with Clyde. In the past, launching a program was an manual process open only to the largest merchants. To this day, most warranty programs are managed in a low-tech way, with merchants sending order CSVs to insurance companies each month. With Clyde, all warranty orders live in a merchant dashboard, which also gives merchants access to analytics to help optimize their programs.
https://www.joinclyde.com/
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/11/clyde-raises-14-million-series-a-to-help-e-commerce-businesses-offer-extended-warranty-plans/
https://thehustle.co/clyde-technologies/
https://radicleinsights.com/posts/breaking-through-brandon-gell
https://www.dig-in.com/list/30-insurance-innovators-to-watch
https://apps.shopify.com/clyde-warranty-platform