Qwiki
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Qwiki was a visual information startup founded in 2010 by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier, the founder of AltaVista. It won TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 with a service that turned topics into narrated visual guides assembled from photos and text. It later pivoted to an iOS app that automatically created short movies from the photos and videos in a user's camera roll, earning Apple's Editor's Choice.
02 / Qwiki FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Qwiki did not collapse on its own. After raising $10.5 million, it was acquired by Yahoo for around $50 million in July 2013. Yahoo kept the app running for over a year, then shut it down on November 1, 2014 as part of a broader cull of products under pressure from activist investors, folding the team into its media projects.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Qwiki was founded.
- Acquisition
Qwiki was acquired.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Qwiki raised $10.5 million in funding, including an $8 million Series A in 2011 led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
- 02
Yahoo acquired Qwiki in July 2013 for around $50 million.
- 03
Yahoo shut down the Qwiki app on November 1, 2014, during a product cull; the team stayed on to work on Yahoo media projects.