Today marks a major milestone for NVP portfolio company Quirky, which just announced the close of a new $68 million round of funding to continue the amazing growth of its disruptive product invention platform. I’m pleased to welcome new investors Andreessen-Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins to the investor group at Quirky, and specifically to welcome Scott Weiss and Mary Meeker who will join the Board from their respective firms. NVP is participating again in this funding round, substantially increasing our investment in this impressive company as it continues on its remarkable journey.
Quirky is a company that is truly disrupting a massive industry, reinventing the entire process of invention—and it’s working. The company has launched more than 50 new consumer products into retail channels in the last 18 months. The Quirky platform allows people to turn ideas into products by bringing together thousands of amateur and professional collaborators from around the world.
Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman has set his sights on building the next great, multinational consumer products company in less than five years —something that would have seemed laughable to a previous generation of entrepreneurs. It’s an astounding process to watch, and the pace of innovative new products being launched has been breathtaking.
This new funding will enable Quirky to bring even more of the thousands of ideas submitted each week to market. The company will begin to dig deeper into its core product categories while also expanding into some exciting new vertical markets. Most rewarding of all will be that more people will become successful, income-earning inventors, and more great products will be released that will surprise and delight consumers around the world.
For several years now I’ve been advocating that the real era of “Social Commerce” is finally upon us, but that it looks nothing like what we thought it would when the phrase first emerged. It turns out that the real innovation in social commerce is not about consumers shopping together for things online, or promoting products on social networks.
The major breakthrough in social commerce involves tapping into the creative power of millions of individuals and connecting them with the operating functions of a manufacturer or retailer. Leaders in this movement are able to supplement their own teams with millions of designers, engineers, buyers, salespeople and marketers. These companies can design and launch products at unprecedented pace and scale, they make informed, data-driven decisions on inventory levels based on demand and they operate smarter, leaner, and faster than incumbents with traditional corporate structures. We’ll be speaking about this trend in more detail with Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman next week on a panel I’m moderating at Shop.org titled, “Community & Crowdsourcing: Lessons from the New Leaders.”
Innovations like social product development that can enable small startups to disrupt large industries make this an incredibly exciting time to be an investor in consumer e-commerce companies. At NVP, we’re putting this investment thesis into practice, betting big on companies that understand and implement these new social operations strategies. Our investments in such companies as ModCloth, Gemvara, Whaleshark Media, Lending Club, Rafter, and Gilt Groupe were driven in whole or in part on this set of beliefs around the power of socially-driven operations. Quirky’s new funding and support, combined with the nearly limitless creativity that the company is tapping (and rewarding) are showing us all that reinventing a traditional industry is completely achievable—and it’s a goal, and a vision, that are worthy of the big bet that today’s announcement represents.