Startup Failures in France

The French insect protein unicorn raised 372M euros, built the world largest insect farm, and entered receivership in 2024 as energy costs and market adoption destroyed the business case.

The $975M Atlassian-Loom deal made Claap's business model obsolete overnight.

A French climate data champion steamrolled by a better-funded American competitor.

GDPR consent management darling crushed by OneTrust commoditization and stalled Series C.

Pivoting into aerospace defense unlocked impossible regulations and killed the company.

European supply chain visibility leader raised €120M and ended up absorbed by the American rival it was fighting.

Pre-owned luxury's poster child burned through $330M trying to authenticate and scale simultaneously.

Built personalized web dashboards with 20M users — acquired by Dassault Systèmes for corporate analytics while Google shut iGoogle and Facebook News Feed replaced the consumer homepage category

73M monthly users in 2022. Raised €60M. Sold to Voodoo for €500K in 2024 — TikTok copied the feature.

France's top restaurant POS was acquired and stripped to its bones by a payments company.

The French home insurance startup that raised €80 million promising to reinvent insurance — then sold to Admiral for €4.3 million when its loss ratio never dropped below 100%

France's edtech darling gutted by the very government subsidies it depended on.

Outgunned by Retool's $145M war chest in the internal tools arms race.

€680M Series B. Then the NFT market evaporated and so did the players

Europe's digital health insurer unicorn that burned €200M/year chasing an elusive profit.

One client built their own tool — and Morphix ceased to exist.

Content curation giant with 4M users couldn't turn data into dollars for enterprise buyers.

The peer-to-peer car sharing platform's European operations collapsed as insurance costs and owner churn destroyed the model

Snap bought France's best social app for $213M. Then quietly killed it to cut costs.

France's music streaming pioneer. SPAC peak. 90% value destruction.

French urban farm in shipping containers that grew exceptional strawberries but never grew a sustainable business.

French payments app raised €200M to become the Venmo of Europe—then pivoted and restructured as P2P payments proved impossible to monetise at scale.

Routing ships around storms couldn't route around a commoditized market.

Paris-born RASP pioneer swallowed by Datadog's observability empire.

Twenty-year French low-code survivor finally fell when Microsoft Power Apps made enterprise deals impossible.

France's top financial aggregator hit a wall when 1M users refused to pay for what they expected for free.

France's second-largest telecom. Altice leveraged buyout. Debt crisis.

The French IoT unicorn that raised €295M to wire the world — and sold its entire network for €5M

French warehouse robot pioneer outspent and absorbed by Swiss material handling giant.

France's cloud gaming pioneer burned €100M proving GPU streaming is brutally expensive.

French legaltech. Bar Association blocked the model.

PSA spent €100M on Parisian EV car-share only to discover vandalism and COVID make it mathematically impossible.

Nine hundred thousand in ARR gone in two weeks when COVID banned the meetings it was built for.

BNP spent €150M building a neobank to compete with itself.

French ICS security pioneer absorbed by Cisco, its OT detection engine buried inside network switches.

Broadcast Roland Garros in VR. Barely anyone was watching.

France's YouTube. YouTube arrived. Vivendi owns the ruins.

France's group payment app. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acquired it. Product focus lost.

The French indie studio that built cult 4X strategy games — acquired by Sega before the franchise could scale.

France's best train booking app. Trainline acquired it. French rail UX got worse.

The French-American publisher of Atari, Driver, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Dungeons and Dragons filed Chapter 11 in January 2013 after decades of mismanagement.

A suite of applications allowing users to manage multiple social media accounts simultaneously across platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Bespoke travel platform with €100M+ raised destroyed by COVID-19.

France's SME banking startup competing against Qonto's €5B position

French agricultural equipment marketplace could not achieve the transaction volume to sustain operations

Bordeaux's precision viticulture startup couldn't scale beyond wine industry pilots

A French digital home insurance startup that lost its ACPR license before it could prove its model.

French teen social app that raised 31 million dollars to be the social platform for Generation Z before TikTok and platform safety regulations wiped out the category.

French TV aggregation app that raised 80 million euros to become the Netflix of live television but was sold to fuboTV at a markdown.

The B2B wholesale unicorn that raised 300 million euros from Bain Capital and had to lay off a quarter of its team

A French engineering metrics platform that could not hold its ground as GitHub, Linear, and Jellyfish ate the category.

French home services marketplace defeated by French labor law

French no-code chatbot builder — ChatGPT made the entire category obsolete

France's Uber alternative rebranded to Kapten, was absorbed by the BMW-Daimler FREE NOW joint venture, then quietly killed.

France's answer to LinkedIn with 65M users that filed for insolvency in 2016 as LinkedIn made it obsolete.

A French instant grocery startup backed by Sequoia that shut down after just 12 months when q-commerce funding evaporated.

Europe's biggest insect farm that couldn't afford to run

The Paris sleep-tech startup raised 73 million euros for a brain-monitoring headband that genuinely improved sleep and sold its assets for nearly nothing when it could not convert clinical outcomes into consumer scale.

French late-night rideshare convicted then acquitted, hobbled forever after

The French quick-commerce startup that raised 40 million euros and was absorbed by Carrefour in 2022 before the grocery giant wound down the service entirely

Parisian beauty subscription pioneer overwhelmed by Birchbox's US-funded entry into France and global beauty box saturation.

Microsoft acquired Sunrise for $100M for its beautiful calendar design — then shut Sunrise 12 months later and launched Outlook Mobile with the same features

Blockchain-incentivized air quality monitoring network stalled when Algorand price collapsed

Ornikar raised €100M to disrupt French driving schools — then went bankrupt as insurance losses destroyed the business it was trying to build

French pay-per-kilometer car insurance startup lost its license and folded

Autonomous shuttle pioneer that arrived a decade too early and ran out of road.

French rental investment proptech that raised 38 million euros to simplify buying and managing investment properties and filed for bankruptcy when rising French mortgage rates made investment property purchases collapse.

Blockchain-based crop traceability startup that raised grants but could not commercialize in smallholder markets.

Meero raised €280M to become the global AI photography platform — then COVID cancelled every photoshoot on earth and the company lost 70% of its staff overnight

NAWA Technologies raised 53 million euros to commercialize carbon nanotube ultracapacitor batteries that could charge in seconds — and filed for sauvegarde creditor protection in 2023 after production costs never approached commercial viability.

French digital meal voucher startup absorbed by Swile

French at-home beauty services marketplace raised €15M but could not achieve contribution-positive economics

French B2B payments infrastructure provider squeezed out by Stripe and Mangopay

European e-scooter startup that raised $150M and sold to Bird at a fraction of its peak value.

France's neobank squeezed between Lydia and Revolut in one of Europe's most competitive fintech markets

Beloved French train booking startup famous for its UX, acquired by Trainline and rebranded out of existence.

Europe's largest P2P car rental platform absorbed and effectively killed by Getaround.

Homeloop brought the Opendoor iBuying model to France — making instant cash offers on homes — and stopped buying properties entirely in 2022 when rising interest rates made every home purchase a guaranteed loss.

Satellite broadband constellation that shut down $1 billion short of launch

French kids coding subscription — Scratch and Minecraft Education made it free

France's peer-to-peer car sharing startup raised €7.5M and was acquired by SNCF's OuiCar, then had its brand discontinued as the larger platform absorbed its users.

Frichti raised 80 million euros to deliver fresh, chef-cooked groceries across Paris — and sold to Gorillas in a distressed deal in 2022, only to see Gorillas itself collapse months later.