Categories: Business, News

It’s been a tough year for Quirky, the New York City-based invention company that opened an office in Schenectady last spring to much fanfare from local business leaders and politicians.

The company was founded on an alluring premise: Ordinary people from all over the world would submit their ideas for inventions to Quirky, and Quirky would help make them a reality. And it did.

It got the products on store shelves and even gave the inventors and “influencers” a cut of the money. But last year, only five years old itself, the startup launched another startup called Wink — a move that its charismatic young founder and CEO Ben Kaufman would eventually admit wasn’t wise.

It wasn’t that Wink was a bad idea. In fact, the Wink platform for connecting lights, locks, air conditioners and other home devices to an app-enabled hub is currently in at least 200,000 homes and the market for smart home devices continues to grow. The problem is that Wink took so much money to get off the ground at a time when Quirky was realizing that its founding business model really worked well only for simple, inexpensive inventions such as bendable power strips.

Then this week, Kaufman said his company was out of money, according to Fortune. He made the remark onstage at a tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, hosted by the national business magazine, but later clarified to the magazine backstage that he has $12 million in cash and plans to save both Quirky and Wink through a new round of financing.

The remarks cap a turbulent year for Quirky, which burned through about $150 million in investments by 2015, underwent several rounds of layoffs (including some in Schenectady) and issued a nationwide recall of its Wink products because of a security error this spring, the Business Insider has reported.

Schenectady officials say they’re not concerned about the company’s financial troubles, calling Quirky a positive force for the city that has exhibited no signs of calling it quits here in the Electric City.

“No, no, no, no. Not at all,” said Ray Gillen, chairman of the Schenectady County Metroplex Development Authority, when asked whether he was concerned about Quirky’s Schenectady operations. “They provide a critical role in the company, especially during the problems it had with Wink. People here were working around the clock, and Schenectady played a pivotal role in helping them through that problem.”

That’s because Schenectady is Quirky’s quality assurance and customer service center. Quirky announced last spring that it was coming to Schenectady, with plans to create an eventual 180 jobs on the top two floors of Center City. The official announcement was held at Proctors’ GE Theater, where officials from the city, county and state showed up to give the company a veritable hero’s welcome.

Metroplex agreed to give Quirky $450,000 toward the renovation and construction costs associated with building out the vacant space in Center City. Empire State Development agreed to give it $500,000 in Excelsior Jobs Program tax credits.

So far, Metroplex has disbursed $300,000 of the $450,000 grant to Quirky, Gillen confirmed Thursday. The money is doled out as the company hits job targets. At last count, Quirky had 150 employees at its Schenectady office, he said.

“Their business model is changing,” Gillen said. “They’re now doing product development for major corporations like GE and Mattel and several others. They’re helping these companies bring products to market faster. We’re in direct contact with the company, and Schenectady plays a pivotal role in their core operation. And as all companies do, the business is evolving and changing.”

Quirky announced its shifting business model earlier this year. It would stop making so many products itself, and instead use the community of more than 1 million inventors it had built since 2009 to help other companies such as General Electric, Mattel and Harman determine new products to launch.

In June, Business Insider reported a round of 30 layoffs had hit each of the company’s locations — Manhattan, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Schenectady. Both the Hong Kong and San Francisco offices, the business news website reported, appear to have closed.

Quirky officials did not respond Thursday to requests for comment for this story. A spokeswoman from the Galesi Group, which leases space to Quirky in Center City, said Thursday that Galesi has no reason to believe the company is planning to close its Schenectady office.

“Quirky is an excellent tenant and we have no indications about any lease termination,” she wrote in an email.

Business Insider and Fortune, which regularly cover the Manhattan-based company and its founder, describe Kaufman as surprisingly open about his company’s struggles and blunders. At the Wednesday conference where he admitted to running out of money, Kaufman said he was hopeful he would land a fresh round of financing from his latest fundraising.

The company has previously raised more than $170 million from the likes of GE, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield, RRE Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.