Quip

Quip was founded in 2012 by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs, two well-known Silicon Valley engineering leaders. Taylor had co-created Google Maps, served as CTO of Google App Engine, co-founded and was CEO of FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook in 2009 for roughly $50 million), and then became Facebook's CTO before departing in mid-2012 to start a new company — his exit was covered by the New York Times as one of the first major talent departures following Facebook's IPO. Gibbs, also a Stanford CS graduate, had joined Google in 2004 and created Google App Engine and Google Suggest, working there until 2012 when he left to co-found Quip as Chief Technology Officer.

Quip publicly launched on July 30, 2013 (blog post 'Introducing Quip'), pitched as a mobile-first word processor for teams that merged documents with messaging/commenting so that discussion about work happened alongside the work itself, rather than in a separate email thread. The product quickly won critical acclaim, being named among the best apps of 2013 by Time, The Guardian, and The Next Web, and was featured in MIT Technology Review's '10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2014' for mobile collaboration. Quip raised a Series A of approximately $15 million around its 2013 launch, with participation from investors including Benchmark (partner Peter Fenton), and early individual backers reported to include Yuri Milner and Marc Benioff (Salesforce's co-founder and CEO), the latter an early sign of the eventual Salesforce relationship. In April 2015, Quip added standalone chat rooms, pushing further into team-communication territory that put it in more direct competition with Slack, and added spreadsheet functionality (covered by Wired in October 2014) to round out its 'docs + spreadsheets + chat' pitch.

On October 15, 2015, Quip announced a $30 million Series B round led by Greylock Partners, with Greylock's John Lilly leading the investment (per Greylock's own portfolio listing) and additional participation reported from investors including Ruttenberg Gordon Investments and Salesforce Ventures. This brought Quip's total disclosed funding to roughly $45 million across its two rounds. Note: Greylock's own site refers to this as Quip's 'Series A' investment from Greylock's perspective/internal labeling, while outside press (Re/code, Crunchbase, Wikipedia) consistently refers to it as Quip's Series B, following the 2013 Benchmark-led Series A — this is a naming discrepancy worth flagging rather than a substantive disagreement about the deal itself.

Business model

B2B SaaS productivity software sold via subscription (per-user pricing) to teams and businesses, plus a free tier for individuals/small teams; after 2016 sold and bundled as part of Salesforce's enterprise product suite.

Subscription (SaaS) — monthly/annual per-seat pricing for Starter and Business/Enterprise tiers; post-acquisition also bundled with Salesforce Customer 360/Sales Cloud offerings.