The Internet's hub for aspiring inventors is going bankrupt.
Quirky, a platform to connect would-be inventors with an online community of more than one million members to help bring their ideas to life, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday following an excruciating year of layoffs and executive shuffles.
The bankruptcy is intended to pave the way for Quirky to sell off its assets, including its name and sizable online community. It has also entered into an agreement to sell Wink, its collection of smarthome products, to Flextronics for $15 million.
"After carefully examining the various alternatives available, the Company concluded that Chapter 11 provides the most effective and efficient process to facilitate sales of substantially all of its assets and provide potential suitors with certain advantages only available in Chapter 11, which will enhance the value of the Company’s assets," Quirky said in its bankruptcy announcement.
The New York-based startup had raised roughly $185 million in private financing from prestigious group of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and General Electric, the last of which it partnered with on connected products for the home.
Even with all that funding, the six-year-old startup struggled with low margins and supply issues trying to get its community's products onto retail store shelves.
"The very basis of the idea of Quirky where we can prove an idea is good and stage-gate the idea development process broke largely because of the traditional bounds of brick and mortar retail," Ben Kaufman, Quirky's founder and former CEO, told Fortune in a candid interview this summer. "The second big portion of it was the brand couldn’t necessarily stretch as much as we thought it could. It worked when we were making small little fun stuff."
