Startup Failures in Canada

Built the workforce OS for construction — right as the construction market froze.

Procurement SaaS couldn't outrun Coupa and Ramp in the race for mid-market CFO wallets.

Driverless trucks on fixed routes couldn't fix the problem of Walmart walking away and regulators stalling.

Turning waste into energy — and $1.2B in value into ashes.

Saving groceries from the bin wasn't enough to save the business.

35,000 small businesses woke up on Dec 27 to find their accountant had vanished overnight.

Canada's telehealth darling for pets that discovered post-COVID demand was a mirage.

Five years of development erased in a single publisher phone call.

3D warehouse robots were too complex, too expensive, and too slow to save a startup burning $3M monthly.

Rockwell paid $530M for an autonomous robot company then shut its consumer division a year later.

The Dauntless studio raised $100M to compete with Monster Hunter and was shut down by its own parent company

When Meta and Adobe build your product for free, your startup is over.

Banner Saga's celebrated creators couldn't secure a publisher for game number four.

Lockheed Martin used it. Scale didn't come fast enough.

The DAC pioneer that got absorbed by the oil industry it was meant to fight.

Canada's billion-dollar health benefits unicorn got absorbed instead of going public.

The fintech startup that invented revenue-based financing for e-commerce and raised $2 billion in AUM — then watched rising interest rates compress its margins to zero

Canada's home-reno lender couldn't survive rising rates and rising defaults.

Going public too early turned Montreal's health app into a TSX cautionary tale.

The world's first commercial quantum computer company proved annealing can't beat classical solvers.

The AI-powered sales note-taking unicorn raised $200M at $1B then collapsed as ChatGPT made the product free

The Canadian precision agriculture unicorn raised $290M, IPO'd on the TSX in 2021, and filed for CCAA protection in 2023 after farmers refused to pay for data-driven insights.

Ships need autonomy; regulators need a decade.

Canada's Opendoor discovered iBuying is catastrophic when housing prices fall.

AI interviewing startup killed by bias backlash and a crashed recruiter-tech market.

Windows CI specialist bootstrapped for a decade before Microsoft's free Azure Pipelines made it unviable.

Canada's online pharmacy champion collapsed under provincial drug pricing constraints.

Tried to be the Franco-Nevada of carbon just as carbon entered a nuclear winter.

Canadian dealer tech darling crushed between entrenched incumbents that could outlast any startup's runway.

Canadian single-seat EV maker listed on NASDAQ raised $140M to commercialise the three-wheeled Solo EV—then shut down production in 2023 having sold fewer than 500 vehicles.

$450M and 20 years couldn't make garbage-to-fuel commercially viable.

LexisNexis raised prices 340% on the data that powered 60% of their product — then it was over.

A $100M Canadian edtech giant that crashed when the pandemic bootcamp bubble burst.

Fifteen years of honest accounting software, undone by a free competitor and a saturated market.

A CAD $210M bet on embedded benefits collapsed under a $4M monthly burn rate.

AI climate scores that couldn't score the actuarial validation insurers demanded.

Vancouver's fintech darling bet on crypto at exactly the wrong moment.

Software cannot substitute for organizational culture change — customers learned this the hard way.

Luxury retail's favorite clienteling app got absorbed by Stripe and quietly disappeared.

One government policy cancellation wiped out a decade of community solar investment.

An 80,000% APY DAO whose CFO turned out to be a convicted crypto fraudster.

AP automation pioneer sold for parts after failing to scale past mid-market limitations.

The NFT moment that made $200M in a week — then the moment passed

A marketplace for transformation consultants that couldn't vet its own supply.

A quantum-safe crypto startup rendered obsolete the moment NIST published free post-quantum standards.

The $1.7B DeFi DAO whose treasury manager was revealed to be the co-founder of the collapsed QuadrigaCX exchange

The crypto broker with $5.9B in assets felled by a $655M unpaid loan from Three Arrows Capital

The NFT product that brought digital collectibles to mainstream audiences — peaking at $700M in monthly volume before the floor price of a LeBron dunk fell 99%.

Psycholinguistic AI that profiled employees' personalities — privacy law and HR ethics ended it.

AI-powered apparel sorting robot absorbed into Ocado's empire, losing its identity.

Crypto brokerage brought down by a $650M loan to Three Arrows Capital

The audio reply platform that pivoted too many times to remember what problem it solved.

The plastic recycling unicorn that Hindenburg Research exposed as vaporware.

Canada's national digital ID champion that couldn't make citizens care.

Siemens partnerships couldn't save this Ottawa MR startup from runway death.

Canada's DERMS champion couldn't scale fast enough to survive its own investors.

Personalized medication packaging for seniors: clinically brilliant, economically catastrophic.

A clinic management tool that needed more management than the clinics it served.

90 million readers, a $600M exit — and the Canadian dream quietly absorbed into Seoul.

Canada's BNPL pioneer absorbed by the very wave it helped create.

Hockey AI analytics that couldn't outskate better-funded rivals in a pandemic-shortened season.

Ore grade software that couldn't grade its own retention metrics.

Canadian office supply marketplace crushed by Amazon Business expansion.

Privacy management pioneer absorbed and dismantled within 12 months of acquisition.

Alphabet's smartest city turned into its most embarrassing exit.

Undercutting Canada Post on price is a race to the bottom nobody wins.

Building elder care into the living room TV was clever but seniors never embraced it.

LiDAR drones that worked in the lab but choked in dusty, humid mine faces.

One lost petroleum contract took down Canada's go-to convenience store POS vendor.

The local TV station digital platform that raised 115M dollars and could not survive as broadcast advertising collapsed.

Canada's premier AI unicorn — acquired by ServiceNow for talent, not for the AI products it promised.

Google's $50M smart city dream died on data privacy and democratic distrust.

Canada's physician platform built on pharma ad revenue — a foundation that regulators dissolved.

An AI contract sniff-test that couldn't survive the enterprise sales maze.

Mapping informal org networks was brilliant research — until employees and lawyers said absolutely not.

On-demand private meeting rooms bookable by the hour raised $121M. COVID ended the need for temporary private spaces. Shut December 2020.

Blockchain couldn't save votes from its own vulnerabilities.

Desktop 3D scanning was a solution looking for a mass-market problem.

Canada's biggest crypto exchange: CEO died in India with the only passwords. $145M locked forever. Later revealed to be a Ponzi from day one.

Zero benefit on every endpoint: Aquinox's bladder drug imploded in Phase 2b, wiping 80% of market cap in hours.

300 million users. A cryptocurrency ICO. An SEC lawsuit. Shutdown.

200 million children played Club Penguin. Disney shut it down. Kids streamed themselves crying.

A square smartphone with a physical keyboard in 2014 — bold design, wrong decade.

Intel paid $175M for ski goggle AR — and killed it in 12 months.

From 50% US smartphone market share to zero in five years — the iPhone destroyed Canada's most valuable company

An online platform that democratized hardware design and customization for anyone without technical expertise.

Apple's mapping disaster became Locationary's exit — the acqui-hire you can't refuse.

BlackBerry launched a tablet with no email and no calendar. Required pairing with a BlackBerry phone. Took a $485M write-down.

Website monitoring platform for developers.

Website monitoring service for developers.

Thoora was a news aggregation platform.

Canadian retail fulfillment robotics startup acquired by Gap Inc for its AI picking technology and wound down as a standalone.

Canadian contract review AI leader absorbed by Litera and wound down as independent product.

Canadian contract review AI acquired by law firm Morgan Lewis — a unique attorney-acquirer outcome.

Published its own financial autopsy showing $43K revenue, $350K/month burn, and 3 months runway — couldn't raise a $15M Series A and shut with the best product reviews of any photo app

Canadian retail associate digital platform that raised $30M and was displaced by Salesforce Retail and Microsoft Teams.

The three-wheeled single-occupant EV startup that raised $130M on a niche vision no market was ready to pay for.

Canadian synthetic data platform — overwhelmed by OpenAI-era data abundance

Canadian enterprise chatbot platform disrupted by ChatGPT six months from Series B close

Canadian AI hotel booking via SMS and WhatsApp, acquired by HotelPlanner and absorbed into a larger platform.

Canadian location data analytics platform absorbed by Foursquare after failing to scale

Canadian legal document AI acqui-hired as Harvey AI and GPT plugins commoditized the market

Montreal sustainable fashion brand raised CAD$32M and filed for creditor protection in COVID

Toronto's legal deposition tech was absorbed as US platforms commoditised remote deposition in Canada

Canadian project management tool from the creators of Slack that was killed by Asana and Monday.com.

On-demand drone insurance pioneer ran out of market as commercial drone adoption stalled

Two-decade fintech reinvented itself four times but never found the formula

Canadian teen messaging app killed Kik to fight SEC enforcement over $100M Kin crypto token ICO

Revenue-based financing unicorn valued at $2B wrote off $40M as ecommerce DTC imploded

Canada most-funded bookkeeping startup raised $113M then gave 35,000 small business customers 5 days notice before shutting down in December 2024.