Short answers, pulled from the story.
Quartz launched on the 24th of September 2012 with a radical premise that it was built exclusively for mobile and tablet screens. This decision ignored the desktop computer that had dominated journalism for decades and declared that the future of business news belonged to the palm of the hand.
The founding team included Kevin Delaney, Zach Seward, and Gideon Lichfield who were drawn from heavyweights like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. They sought to create a digitally native outlet for a global economy that was increasingly mobile.
By 2015 the publication had expanded aggressively into new markets launching Quartz India and Quartz Africa alongside specific editions for Hong Kong, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates. This approach allowed Quartz to report from 115 countries in 19 languages establishing a global footprint that felt native to the devices people carried everywhere.
In 2018 the Japanese company Uzabase acquired Quartz from Atlantic Media for 86 million dollars. This move signaled a shift in ownership from American to Japanese control and preceded a series of high-stakes transactions and geopolitical conflicts that tested the resilience of the newsroom.
In April 2025 G/O Media sold Quartz and its sister site The Inventory to Redbrick a Canadian software firm. This transaction resulted in the layoff of ten out of twelve newsroom employees and marked a turning point where the publication expanded its use of generative AI to publish lengthier articles.