Quicky, head to head with technology giants

In the startup environment, it is a habit to talk about successes to keep our hopes alive for the future, but it is a big mistake to forget the failures of the past and not benefit from the experiences of the past. For this purpose, the Ecomotive team has collected the experiences of a series of failed startups, so that reviewing their failed stories may be a basis for the success of new startups in Iran’s startup community. This collection will be published and made available to the audience in the form of the story of failure. The sixteenth part of this series which tells the story of the failure of Quixey startup Let’s review together.

Quicky started out as a mobile search company and then offered a digital assistant for mobile apps. Using this assistant, users could search for their desired content in their applications; That is, the technology could take them from search results directly to personal activities such as showing close friends on Facebook or pulling up a music playlist. In addition, users could describe their desired application in natural language for this search engine to find it.

The company also called a new type of search Functional search had invented a tool that collected information about each application and its capabilities from browser sites, blogs, social media and other sources. This technology allows users to search on various platforms and eliminates the need for multiple searches with different mobile devices. Before launching the beta version of the functional search engine privately in April 2011, Quicksey spent a year and a half building it. In May 2011, the Quickie website was launched to the public.

In December 2012, Quicky partnered with the federated search engine Ask.com and started enabling in-app search on it. The company also enabled said search for two Sprint products: Sprint Digital Lounge and Sprint Zone.

A month later, Quickxi announced that it was supporting almost 100 million searches per month and that it had grown to more than 50 employees.

In the meantime, big giants like Apple and Google were looking to improve the search features on their devices, and this narrowed the field of competition for Quicky.

In October 2013, Quicky received $50 million in Series C funding from Alibaba. At the same time, the company also signed a separate commercial deal with Alibaba for $100 million; That is, Alibaba became both an investor and a customer of Quixi. After restructuring the book of shares of Alibaba and Quickxi, the company did not accept the repayment schedule of its debt to the Chinese company, however, it agreed to it.

In 2015, the company raised $60 million worth of capital at an approximate value of $600 million. However, in February 2016, after the company missed its revenue targets, some executives left Quicky.

In early 2017, Quicksey had raised $10 million in capital, which was not enough to repay its debt to Alibaba, although it hoped the money would buy it time to find a new customer. But Alibaba refused to accept new foreign investment, a decision that eventually led to layoffs.

“Unfortunately, the company’s progress has not met our expectations and the board of directors has decided to terminate the business,” Alibaba said in a statement.