 | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Headquarters | New York City |
| Founder(s) | Ben Kaufman |
| Key people | Gina Waldhorn, President |
| Parent |
|
| URL | www |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 1.2 million+ |
| Launched | June 2009 |
| Current status | Inactive |
Quirky was an invention platform that connected inventors with companies that specialized in a specific product category. [1]
Quirky was founded in 2009 by Ben Kaufman. [2]
In April 2010, Quirky received $6.5 million in Series A venture capital funding, led by RRE Ventures. [3] The company later received a $16 million Series B round in August 2011 led by Norwest Venture Partners, and a $68 million Series C round in September 2012 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. [4] Then, in November 2013, Quirky raised $79 million in Series D funding from General Electric (GE) as well as its venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Norwest Venture Partners, RRE, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. [5] Part of the deal included a $30 million investment from GE, as well as a partnership to build 30 connected-home gadgets together in the next five years. [6]
In 2011, a reality television series named Quirky debuted on the Sundance Channel following events at the Quirky office. [7]
The May 6, 2012, episode of CNN's The Next List featured CEO Ben Kaufman and the company. [8]
On July 31, 2015, Ben Kaufman stepped down as CEO following a layoff of 111 employees due to trouble getting funding. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
On September 22, 2015, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. [14] [15] The company's assets, including its website and most of its products, were bought by Q Holdings for $4.7 million in late 2015, despite objections from General Electric. [16] [17] [18] Quirky's smart home Wink platform was sold to Flextronics for $15 million in November 2015. [19] [20]
It was announced on February 8, 2016, that the company had new financing and owners. [21]
As of April 24, 2024, Quirky's invention submission platform is not accessible. [22]
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs in over 900 ventures, including America Online, Amazon.com, Tandem Computers, Compaq, Electronic Arts, JD.com, Square, Genentech, Google, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Nest, Palo Alto Networks, Synack, Snap, AppDynamics, and Twitter. By 2019 it had raised around $9 billion in 19 venture capital funds and four growth funds.
Airware was an American venture-funded startup that provided commercial unmanned aerial vehicles for enterprises. The company ceased operations on September 14, 2018.
Drew D. Perkins is a serial entrepreneur and is co-founder and CEO of Mojo Vision, a company developing Mojo Lens, the first true smart contact lens.
The iFund is a US$200 million capital fund. Developers may enter into equity deals for the creation of applications, services, and components for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad platform. It is being offered and managed by venture capital company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
Ngmoco, LLC was an American-based publisher of video games for the iOS and Android platforms, and a subsidiary of DeNA Co., Ltd. The company was founded by former Electronic Arts executive Neil Young in July 2008. Since its founding, ngmoco has had more than seven million combined game installs. Venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Norwest Venture Partners, among others, have financed the company with a combined total of US$40.6 million. The company is most well known for their publishing of the Rolando game series and Eliminate Pro.
Benjamin Abraham Horowitz is an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Andreessen. He previously co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, a book about startups, and What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
Scott Weiss is an American venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, joining in April 2011 as the firm's fourth general partner. A native of Sarasota, Florida, he founded and was CEO of IronPort Systems, which Cisco acquired in 2007 for $830 million.
John O’Farrell is an Irish venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, which he joined in June 2010 as its third general partner. He serves on the boards of PagerDuty, Slack, Factual, GoodData, Granular, IFTTT, ItsOn and the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.
Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content management and digital commerce.
Mike Abbott was the Executive Vice President, Software for General Motors. He was formerly the vice president of Apple's Cloud Services team. He also previously worked as a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, vice president of engineering at Twitter, team lead for Azure at Microsoft and senior vice president of apps and services at Palm.
Dropcam, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company is known for its Wi-Fi video streaming cameras, Dropcam and Dropcam Pro, that allow people to view live feeds through Dropcam's cloud-based service. On June 20, 2014, it was announced that Google's Nest Labs bought Dropcam for $555 million, a decision Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy later described as a "mistake". In June 2015, Nest introduced the Nest Cam, a successor to the Dropcam Pro. Support for Dropcam services ended on April 8, 2024.
Dialpad Meetings is a cloud-based video conferencing system from Dialpad, a privately held company in San Francisco, California. The company, formerly known as Firespotter Labs, was co-founded by Craig Walker one year after he was the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Google Ventures.
Looker Data Sciences, Inc. is an American computer software company headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. It was acquired by Google in 2019 and is now part of the Google Cloud Platform. Looker markets a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Wink is an American brand of software and hardware products that connects with and controls smart home devices from a consolidated user interface. Wink, Labs Inc., which develops and markets Wink, was founded in 2014 as a spin-off from invention incubator Quirky. After Quirky went through bankruptcy proceedings, it sold Wink to Flex in 2015. As of 2016, the Wink software is connected to 1.3 million devices. In July 2017, Flex sold Wink to i.am+ for $59 million.
Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites.
Flow is an American residential real-estate company. It was founded in 2022 by the former CEO of WeWork Adam Neumann and funded by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company hopes to address some aspects of the United States housing shortage through technology, providing equity for renters, and a new type of social interaction. The startup is initially planning to operate 3,000 apartment units, purchased by Neumann, in Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and Miami and Fort Lauderdale in Florida.
Captions is a video-editing and AI research company headquartered in New York City. Their flagship app, Captions, is available on iOS, Android, and Web and offers a suite of tools aimed at streamlining the creation and editing of videos.
 | This article about an internet company is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
