Quirky, a New York City-based product development company that helps creative people bring their ideas to market leveraging crowds, has raised $68m in Series C funding.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures.
The company, which has raised $97m, to date, intends to use the capital to:
– increase its capacity to produce more and better products across an increasing number of verticals, and
– refine its community submission and contribution process and grow its product development and community engagement teams.
Founded in 2009 by CEO Ben Kaufman, Quirky has built a platform that is designed to facilitate invention: Its online community of of over 260,000 creative people collaborates with an in-house team of product designers, engineers, and manufacturing and retail specialists to develop new and innovative products.
Since its launch, the company has collaboratively developed hundreds of new products, many of which can be found in Amazon.com, Target, Staples, OfficeMax and Bed Bath & Beyond.
The revenue from all these products is shared with those who created and collaborated on them.
In conjunction with the funding, Scott Weiss, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and Mary Meeker, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, will join Quirky’s Board of Directors.
FinSMEs
07/09/2012