Social Product Development Company Secures $68 Million in Series C Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz; Scott Weiss and Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker Join Board
NEW YORK — (BUSINESS WIRE) — September 6, 2012 — Quirky, the company that helps creative people bring their ideas to market, today announced $68 million in Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with significant participation from new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). The funding round also included existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures. Quirky has raised $97 million to date.
Quirky is redefining the way people think about product development. The company has built a platform that facilitates invention and is home to a growing, talented online community of creative people that are paired with an expert in-house team of product designers, engineers, and manufacturing and retail specialists. Today this active and fluid process allows Quirky to develop two new and innovative products each week. Since its launch in 2009, Quirky has collaboratively developed hundreds of new products, many of which can be found in Target, Staples, OfficeMax and Bed Bath & Beyond. The revenue from all these products is shared with those who created and collaborated on them.
Quirky’s new partners share the fundamental belief that Quirky is changing the process of product development. "It took one year and 45 days to build the Empire State Building," noted Ben Kaufman, founder and CEO of Quirky. "It takes most consumer product companies 18 to 24 months to launch a new vegetable peeler. Something is wrong here."
Quirky will use the new funding to grow the company's capacity to produce more and better products across an increasing number of verticals. The Company will also refine its community submission and contribution process and grow its product development and community engagement teams. Additionally, Quirky will seek to involve community members at the retail level through a new distribution program.
Scott Weiss, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and Mary Meeker, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, will join Quirky’s Board of Directors.
“Offline retail and product development are well overdue for innovation and Quirky is the most exciting new retail concept we’ve seen since the Apple store opened over a decade ago,” said Scott Weiss. “Ben Kaufman had the vision to democratize product development. Quirky has taken the speed and best practices of online software development and brought it to bear in developing offline consumer products."
Read more about Quirky on Scott Weiss’ blog here.
Mary Meeker added: “Quirky’s social design platform is reinventing consumer product R&D with materially faster time from product conceptualization, to design and manufacturing and, ultimately, to retail sale. Since its founding in 2009, Quirky has launched more than 200 innovative products -- including top-sellers Pivot Power, Cordies and Crates -- and has paid out over $2 million to its inventors and contributors. The pace of Quirky product launches and number of contributors, now at 260,000 online users, is rapidly accelerating. We are thrilled to work with Ben and the company at such an exciting time in Quirky’s growth trajectory to make invention accessible to nearly everyone.”
About Quirky
Quirky is a social product development company that brings new product ideas to life through its online collaborative platform. Quirky’s global community of over 260,000 members collaborates with Quirky’s in-house team of designers and engineers on all aspects of design from sketch to store shelves. Anyone can participate on Quirky.com either by submitting their own product idea for $10, or by voting, determining pricing and influencing other people's product ideas. 30 cents of every dollar generated from the direct sale of a product on Quirky.com goes back to these influencers. National retail partnerships include Target, Staples, OfficeMax, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Amazon.com. www.quirky.com
About Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technology companies. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Its general partners are Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O'Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan and Peter Levine, all widely recognized experts in the creation, scaling and operation of high growth technology companies. The firm has $2.7 billion under management across three funds. Among its 150 investments are Airbnb, Apptio, Box, Fab.com, Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Jawbone, Lytro, Pinterest, Silver Tail Systems and Twitter. The firm was established in June 2009 and is located in Menlo Park, California. www.a16z.com
About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) has backed entrepreneurs in more
than 500 ventures leading to 150 IPOs, 350,000 jobs and a deep strategic
network. The firm has helped build pioneering companies like Amazon,
Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Netscape,
Symantec and VeriSign. KPCB partners serve on the boards of
Amazon,
Apple, Bloom Energy, Flipboard, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nest, Square
and Zynga, among others. KPCB accelerates the success of entrepreneurs
with a team of partners delivering company-building services
including strategy, operational scaling, recruiting, business
development and product delivery. The firm invests in all stages from
seed and incubation to growth companies. KPCB operates from offices in
Menlo Park, San Francisco, Shanghai and Beijing.
http://www.kpcb.com
