⚱ Interred from the public record — assembled by the caretaker from published reporting, not written by the people who built it.
Quibi
2020
$1.75 billion raised. Six months served. 72,000 paying subscribers.
Certificate of Death
State of Perpetual Beta · Dept. of Discontinued Software
- The departed
- Quibi
- Known for
- Big-budget shows in under-ten-minute chapters, for phones only
- Born
- April 6, 2020
- Died
- October 21, 2020
- Survived
- 7 months
- Cause of death
- Nobody wanted it
- Peak MRR
- Undisclosed
- Lifetime revenue
- Undisclosed
- Capital burned
- $1.8B
- Founder-hours lost
- Uncounted
- Survived by
- 500k users
- Laid to rest by
- The caretaker, from public record
- Interred
- July 30, 2026
- Source
- cnbc.com
Eulogy
Quibi raised $1.75 billion from Disney, NBCUniversal, Time Warner, Viacom and Sony on a single premise: premium video built for the gaps in your day — the commute, the queue, the lift. It launched on 6 April 2020, three weeks into a pandemic that abolished all three. By July it had around 72,000 paying subscribers. On 21 October 2020, roughly six months after launch, it announced it was shutting down.
Lessons for the living
The entire product was a bet on one context of use. When that context vanished, there was nothing underneath it.