Startup Failures in Israel

Promised to charge your EV in 5 minutes. Took 12 years and $200M to prove it couldn't scale.

Israel's cultivated meat champion merged into obscurity as regulatory dreams evaporated.

Raised $320M to beat NVIDIA at the edge. Three layoff rounds later, the edge won.

Weizmann spinout raised $46M on phage therapy hope, collapsed after Phase 2 failure.

Co-shopping with influencers sounded great — brands just couldn't measure if it worked.

Digitizing trade documents for an industry that still loves paper.

From $1.4B SPAC darling to 97% stock collapse in three years.

Walmart's delivery OS partner could not survive geopolitical risk and endless enterprise sales cycles.

Israel's P2P insurer was crushed between market concentration and the October 7 shock.

Walmart drone delivery partner that couldn't crack the unit economics.

The Israeli adtech company that merged with Unity at 4.4B USD. Unity wrote off most of the value in 12 months.

A public market for freight pricing couldn't make the market come to it.

AI-powered life insurance that burned $69M before finding its first profitable customer.

Raised $60M to photograph every crop on earth, sold in distress to a tractor maker.

iCount lost its regulatory race to licensed challengers and was swept up by Israel's war economy.

The Twitch tooling platform raised $100M+ and then the streaming creator economy cratered

Identity posture management startup shut down in 2023 after ISPM market collapsed before it matured.

Built kids' ad tech, then the FTC handed them a $1.7M fine and ended the company.

AI anomaly detection commoditized by Datadog and AWS — $65M couldn't fight free features.

Automated data lineage tool acquired and killed by Cloudera as standalone market proved too narrow.

Israeli mobile testing tool survived acquisition only to be retired when its acquirer hit financial turbulence.

Built the safety net for self-driving cars, but the cars never arrived at scale.

Built government-grade file sanitization tech, then Microsoft gave it away for free.

Israel's original internet portal. Digital advertising collapse. Sold for almost nothing.

Israel's smart home insurer lost 95% of its SPAC value as climate claims obliterated the loss ratio

Israeli website builder for agencies. Wix and Squarespace commoditized the category.

Sold to Intel for a modest exit, then killed in corporate cost-cutting within a year.

Israeli adtech unicorn. $11B SPAC. App tracking changes. 90% value loss.

Could detect COPD from your voice. Couldn't detect a path through FDA regulations.

New York's AI insurance unicorn lost 90% of its IPO value as claims costs destroyed the loss ratio

Israeli insurtech unicorn. $7B peak. 90% value destruction. Loss ratio never improved.

Israeli ride-hailing unicorn. B2C failed vs Uber. B2B pivot. Still struggling.

Ten years of personalized health intelligence that no one in the ecosystem would pay enough to sustain.

Charting too many courses sank the original mission.

Employee wellbeing SaaS. Acquired by Roper Technologies. Absorbed.

Ten FDA clearances, zero path to profitability — sold for a fraction of its promise.

Zero-trust SSH and RDP access startup absorbed by Perimeter81 before the ZTNA wave fully arrived.

Israeli enterprise mobility platform. IBM acquired it for the technology. Product retired.

Monitored parolees with faulty ankle bands, then couldn't escape its own corporate collapse.

Google's $200M data pipeline buy quietly died within months of acquisition.

Sold for $45M, then slowly erased from existence inside a larger company.

Predicted everyone's sales outcomes except its own acqui-hire fate.

Battery-swapping EV network raised $850M and failed to get one carmaker to commit

Israeli document AI for financial compliance drowned in enterprise sales cycles

Israeli retail analytics AI — acquired by a US retail tech firm for the team, not the product

Tel Aviv's SASE pioneer was absorbed by Check Point as SASE category consolidated

Israeli connected goods startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that raised 67 million dollars to put IoT chips in retail products and entered zombie mode as retail hardware adoption proved slower than projected.

The automotive data marketplace that sold the dream of connected car monetization before the market was ready

Cultivated beef pioneer backed by SoftBank that cut 50% of staff when regulatory approvals stalled.

The micro-fulfillment robotics startup that automated grocery warehouses before running out of cash

Israeli computer vision agritech acquired by Valmont and product discontinued

Israeli blockchain startup pivoted through three identities and found none

Israeli migrant financial services platform raised $30M and shut down as neobank CAC made it unviable

TriEye raised $75M to put near-infrared sensing chips in every car — then the automotive chip market crashed and funding dried up before the product reached production

Israeli AI video creation startup raised $30M and was outcompeted by Canva and TikTok built-in tools

Israeli computational genomics pioneer that spent 30 years predicting drug targets and never produced a successful drug.

Israeli interactive video startup that raised $170M trying to make branching narratives mainstream.

Israel's neobank competing in one of the world's most tech-savvy per-capita markets

Israeli contract AI startup acquired by Ironclad and integrated away from independence.

Israeli deception technology pioneer raised $90M and was absorbed by Proofpoint before the category matured.

Venn raised $100M to transform entire city neighborhoods into curated living communities — then discovered that managing people at neighborhood scale is not a scalable business

The Israeli endpoint security unicorn that SoftBank backed with 900 million dollars and could not dislodge CrowdStrike

Israeli cashierless checkout tech raised $100M but grocery chains refused to deploy at scale

Israeli B2B ground transport platform that raised $650M and shut down its consumer app to survive.

The Israeli insurtech unicorn raised $80M to connect insurance risk with capital markets, then collapsed in August 2023 when $4B in letters of credit turned out to be fraudulent.

Israeli gig marketplace for home services trades raised $20M and could not crack supply reliability

Israeli hotel booking aggregator that split stays across multiple rates raised $8M and went dark

Gamida Cell spent 26 years developing a stem cell therapy for blood cancers, won FDA approval in 2023 — and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2024 because the approved drug could not generate enough revenue to survive.

Israeli global payroll unicorn that raised 440 million dollars at a 3.7 billion dollar valuation before Tiger Global wrote it down and mass layoffs followed.

Israeli dashcam AI startup that raised $97M from Porsche and others to build the connected vehicle intelligence network before the data monetization revenue never materialized.