Startup Failures in Denmark

The MIT-founded scooter company that built the safest vehicle — then ran out of money

The world's best CS:GO team tried to become a publicly traded eSports conglomerate and proved eSports can't make money

The world's largest wine app — which couldn't turn 50 million users into profits

Optimized ports, unoptimized business model.

Denmark's $4.7B spend management unicorn cut 15% of staff as the SMB fintech winter hit hard

Danish collaboration platform acquired by Citrix for $50M in 2012—and quietly killed eleven years later.

Denmark's gig-economy insurance startup was buried by the regulatory complexity it failed to map in advance.

Acquired for $53M in 2012, then slowly starved to death by a corporate parent who forgot it existed.

350,000 loyal Danish users couldn't save a free PFM app from acqui-hire oblivion.

Desktop powder sintering — squeezed out between prosumer SLA and industrial MJF.

Danish hospitality technology SaaS that raised $15M and lost to Mews and Cloudbeds in the hotel PMS market.

The Copenhagen B2B trade network raised $400M from HSBC and Goldman to become the operating system for global trade and nearly collapsed in 2023 requiring emergency credit from its own investor to survive.

Silicon carbide membrane filtration for marine scrubber wastewater

Danish SME invoicing SaaS acquired by SumUp and sunset as the parent pivoted away from software.

Copenhagen's SaaS backup platform couldn't differentiate as Microsoft and Veeam dominated the backup market

Danish ceramic membrane filtration company that won IMO 2020 contracts then collapsed when orders dried up.

The Danish payments startup that stayed too local as the market went global

Danish P2P lending platform shut down by EU regulatory tightening

Nordic accounting marketplace overtaken by the tools it aggregated

Danish IoT peer-to-peer connectivity platform that lost to AWS IoT and Azure IoT Hub.

Copenhagen's emergency call AI suffered a near-death experience as healthcare procurement cycles outran its runway