Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Quirky Collects $68M for Crowdsourced Gadgets

Quirky, the community site that conceives and builds physical products, has raised $68 million in Series C funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and including Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners and RRE Ventures.

The New York City-based company develops products like flexible power plugs and kitchen gadgets that are suggested by its community and refined by contributors and in-house experts. (I have a couple at home, including a bobble toothbrush stand.) It sells the products online and in stores like Target and shares revenue with the contributors.

Quirky has made 200 products in the past three years, and it told the Wall Street Journal it expects $20 million in revenue this year, with more than a hundred contributors making tens of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Quirky fits nicely with the current boom of crowdfunded and start-up hardware, but the company puts much more structure and support around the creation process than open platforms like Kickstarter.

Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz and Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins are joining Quirky’s board of directors.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”