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Emeryville, California-based company, Bolt Threads, was launched in 2009 by three Ph.D. scientists with the ambitious plan to create the next generation of high-performance materials. By applying engineering methods to biological systems, Bolt Threads delivers new sustainable solutions for the global apparel and cosmetic industries. Led by world-class scientific and engineering talent, the company strives to answer the most immediate and vexing environmental problems in our world today.

Managing the growth of dataAccording to the World Bank, a whopping 20% of polluted wastewater globally comes from the textile industry. It is because of this that Bolt Threads has made its mission to provide superior alternatives to the clothing worn on a daily basis while minimizing the impact to the environment.

Bolt Threads has successfully released two ground breaking materials: Bolt Threads Microsilk™ consumer product, which replicates the stunning ability of spiders to produce silk fibers that are highly elastic, durable and soft, and Mylo™, a material based on mycelium, the underground root structure of mushrooms, which looks and feels remarkably like leather without the need to raise or sacrifice livestock. These materials are used in end-products sold by the company and through retail partners.

Bolt Threads also strategically spun off a direct-to-consumer brand called Eighteen B, which uses lab-created silk protein technology called b-silk as a key ingredient in sustainable cosmetic and beauty products.

To achieve its scientific innovations, Bolt

Threads uses a variety of backend tools and technologies: NetSuite for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Klavio for email campaigns, Facebook and Google Ad Manager for marketing purposes, Amazon RedShift for analysis, and Tableau for data visualization. Bolt Threads has a cloud-first approach to its technology and relies heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Data is the backbone of our scientific research,” says Deven Dharm, Director of Software Engineering at Bolt Threads. “With the increase of data necessary for innovation, the expenses of managing and moving the data has grown exponentially.”

With the dramatic growth of scientific data it generated, Bolt Threads’ legacy in-house tools lacked the maturity to enable the transformation to big data. The tools were also complex and required expertise that was difficult to find. This prompted Dharm and his team to look for better and more modern solutions.

Why Talend?“The fact that Talend can manage big data seamlessly and cost-effectively was a big factor in our choice. Ultimately, Talend has proven to provide the best value for the cost,” says Dharm.

The Bolt Threads team implemented Talend in less than three weeks, leveraging Talend’s help to better understand the platform architecture and to help tune the services to optimize performance.

“Talend has been a phenomenal partner, providing a great product offering, and giving us the flexibility and versatility that we need

Creating sustainable materials for a resource- constrained world

““We invent revolutionary materials inspired by nature. Data is a catalyst for our scientific discovery.

CA S E S T U DY

”Deven Dharm, Director of Software Engineering at Bolt Threads.

INDUSTRY

• Manufacturing

INFORMATION• HQ: USA

• 51-200 employees

USE CASE• Scientific research

• Sales and Marketing efficiency

CHALLENGE• Managing the growth of data

TALEND PRODUCT USED• Talend Cloud Big Data

PARTNERS• Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Redshift - S3

RESULTS

• <30 minutes for data collection and transformation

• Near real-time access to data

• 70% in cost savings

to run our business. It offers a highly usable interface and a stable, reliable platform that allows us to focus more on our business and less on making IT work,” says Dharm.

The robustness and stability of the Talend platform, combined with its ability to scale cost effectively and provide real-time insights, has proven to be its biggest value. “Talend saves us more than 70% of what we used to spend on our legacy tools while providing far better results.”

Data as the backbone of scientific research and innovation Bolt Threads now uses Talend Cloud Big Data across the organization for scientific research and in sales and marketing, advertising, and e-commerce applications.

The team stores its scientific data in Benchling, a cloud-based software platform for researchers. “We look at millions of DNA sequences and combine them to create new strains to get the outcome we need,” says Dharm. “An example is a mushroom with a root structure and a bulb. If we don’t want the bulb of the mushroom, we can suppress the growth of that bulb by manipulating specific portions of the DNA that lead to the growth of the bulb.”

“With Talend we can get near real-time insights into the hands of our stakeholders to help them make better and faster decisions,” says Dharm. “The scientific community doesn’t like to wait so speed is extremely important to us.” Before the use of Talend the data was at least a day old. “Now we’re able to deliver data to our scientists within thirty minutes of its availability,” says Dharm.

Talend is also used in a variety of ways including moving sales data into the data warehouse to provide operational and data mining reports for better decision making. “We want to understand who our customers are and segment them based on recency and frequency of purchase,” says Dharm. For the company’s marketing efforts, they connect with tools such as Facebook and Google Ad Manager to understand their consumers. Bolt Threads then uses this data to make appropriate decisions for various programs such as advertising spend.

Using Talend to move data into their data warehouse allows Bolt Threads to further analyze consumer behavior and conversions and gain better understanding of the time users spend on their e-commerce site.

“Talend saves us more than 70% of what we used to spend on our legacy tools with far better results.”

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