AI Startup Failures

AI sales copy tool killed when every CRM added a free AI writer.

Captured $100M in funding and the activity data of the Fortune 500 — then Salesforce captured the market.

FMCG shelf optimization AI that optimized itself out of existence when its anchor client walked away.

Blast AI that overestimated savings by 4x and triggered compliance incidents at Kiruna.

500K users in 60 days, zero sustainable revenue, dead in 15 months.

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

Microsoft paid $650M for the AI team — then the company they left kept the money

AI meeting tool killed the day Zoom made its AI features free for all users.

A German AI estimating tool outpaced by entrenched US incumbents in its home market.

The German AI chip startup backed by SAP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise raised 120M euros and shut in December 2024 after failing to commercialize.

The company that open-sourced Stable Diffusion and disrupted the entire creative industry — then collapsed into governance chaos, unpaid employees, and a founder resignation when its $4B valuation met operational reality

AI copywriting pioneer for enterprise email, commoditized out of existence by ChatGPT.

MIT's tabular AI star couldn't outforecast SAP in the enterprise — sold to Scale AI for a fraction of its value.

Enterprise AI helpdesk that got crushed by Microsoft's bundling strategy.

The AI browser automation startup raised 415M dollars from Microsoft and Google and was effectively acqui-hired by Amazon in June 2024.

Promised AI-perfect forecasts for everyone else's revenue — couldn't forecast its own survival.

The company behind Moxie, the AI social robot for children with autism, shut down leaving 10,000 families with bricked devices.

OpenAI gave Viable's enterprise customers the tools to fire them.

Won Salesforce's AI prize, then lost to Zendesk's native features.

Microsoft's virtual assistant — outcompeted by Alexa, beaten by Siri, killed by ChatGPT

The AI drive-through voice ordering system that SPAC'd at $450M then almost went bankrupt when the voice AI didn't work reliably enough

The AI drug discovery unicorn that couldn't discover profits

SoftBank's chatty robots charmed demos but failed every real-world ROI test.

Cognitive AI for supply chains that couldn't survive the cognitive dissonance of enterprise sales.

Mine safety AI that missed the one alarm that mattered — and lost everything.

$45M raised, Fortune 500 clients won, then LLMs made the whole stack irrelevant.

Microsoft's $19/month Copilot made their $50K contracts irrelevant overnight.

Acquired by Salesforce, then killed by Salesforce — the ultimate enterprise irony.

AI SDR platform acquired and then buried inside a legacy CCaaS vendor.

The enterprise AI platform that couldn't prove its own ROI

Clinical NLP pioneer with NHS contracts underpiced into extinction by Amazon in 2018.

The AI writing startup that raised $131 million and became a unicorn in 18 months — then watched ChatGPT ship the same product for free and lost 30% of its team

Japan's edge AI pioneer built a clever platform, then Nvidia and Google commoditized the entire market.

The autonomous trucking unicorn that drove straight into a national security investigation.

Survived a Ticketmaster breach scandal only to be destroyed by ChatGPT's shadow.

ChatGPT killed this chatbot startup in under 90 days.

GPT-4's launch froze every enterprise buying decision — Evolution AI's pipeline evaporated overnight.

Ex-Apple engineers built ADAS software but Mobileye had already locked every OEM that mattered.

25 million developers used the code; almost none paid for it — $70M burned slowly.

Open-source Alexa killer died fighting trillion-dollar free products for eight years.

The AutoML unicorn that automated its own irrelevance

Shopify and Amazon adding free AI copy killed Copysmith's only distribution channel.

Anonymous street sensors couldn't escape surveillance fears or municipal budget cuts.

SoftBank-fueled AI unicorn hopeful that expanded too far when the money spigot closed.

GM robotaxi unit suspended all operations after a driverless car dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. GM wrote down $8B.

The human data labeler that AI made obsolete

Autonomous replenishment AI that couldn't replenish its own client base after supply chain chaos.

100M downloads, a war, and Snapchat copying your feature — Reface couldn't survive all three.

Eight years building enterprise voice AI, made obsolete by ChatGPT in six months.

Forty million dollars and a decade building enterprise AI governance that never found its market.

Ships need autonomy; regulators need a decade.

Twenty years of semantic NLP made obsolete in eighteen months by GPT-4.

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

AI that predicted athlete injuries couldn't predict its own financial collapse.

Ten years of AI decision-making tech that never cracked enterprise scale.

Emotion AI for call centers killed by its own bias findings and incoming EU regulation.

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

Browser extension AI for support teams rendered obsolete by native integrations.

Projected $100M in enterprise AI revenue, delivered $12M — Nasdaq delisting warnings followed.

Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos all backed this AGI dream — it still couldn't ship a product in 12 years.

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

Pinterest bought The Yes's AI talent, not its business — the product disappeared on day one of the acquisition.

Enterprise chatbots that promised intelligence but delivered confusion at scale.

Went public at $2.1B on voice AI promise, lost 90% of value within a year.

AI traffic optimizer learned that city infrastructure cycles outlast startup runways.

Environmental satellite tech killed by the government it was built to serve.

Brand pivot from Qordoba to Writer couldn't outrun GPT-3 commoditization.

Brazil's Portuguese voice AI champion couldn't survive currency depreciation and platform giants.

Clinical graph AI trapped by HIPAA data walls while IBM and Google captured the market.

The AI code completion tool with 500,000 developer users that shut down in November 2022 — killed by GitHub Copilot, the same technology it pioneered, built by the company whose code repositories fed its training data

AI that watched employees too closely — regulators and workers pushed back hard.

Wired's explosive exposé of underpaid Kenyan moderators sent enterprise clients fleeing in 2022.

AI pricing genius built in Kyiv, dismantled by missiles and sanctions.

Crowdsourced customer support sounded brilliant until the economics didn't work.

Apple-backed basketball AI that couldn't convert 2 million downloads into a business.

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

The AI that was supposed to cure cancer — sold for scrap

Powered car conversations for a decade, then Microsoft's healthcare pivot killed the engine.

Built the future of field sales — then COVID cancelled field sales.

Built by Uber engineers to kill support tickets — acqui-hired before it could scale.

Apple's iOS 14 privacy update single-handedly destroyed this $25M consumer analytics platform.

Charting too many courses sank the original mission.

Colombian AI analytics startup. Tableau and Power BI commoditized the category.

Modernized call centers until Amazon and Google made it a commodity.

A construction AI safety tool that never escaped its single-use-case ceiling.

The AI podcast discovery tool acquired by YouTube and never seen again.

Supply chain AI for India's informal retail network that drowned in dirty data.

The music rights startup that couldn't pivot fast enough from old media to new audio.

AI that scanned Instagram trends couldn't manufacture clothes fast enough before those trends died on the feed.

A decade building speech AI commoditized overnight by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

An AI facility platform that COVID's budget freezes turned off like a light switch.

$121M raised for real-time AI surveillance. CEO's KKK past destroyed it overnight.

Supply chain simulation that simulated independence it could never truly achieve.

Neuroscience AI from MIT's orbit that spent a decade looking for enterprise customers.

Built voice shopping for the web, then Apple bought them to teach Siri how to shop.

Robot pizza trucks that burned $423M before the first slice

Drone analytics pioneer ran out of runway trying to bridge hardware costs with software margins.

The virtual fitting room that was 10 years too early — killed by slow mobile rendering and minimal conversion uplift.

Built the voice for Hello Barbie, then got absorbed into Siri's silence.

AI marketing optimization too expensive and slow to integrate for the clients it targeted.

Data labeling pioneer rebranded just in time for the AI boom, then sold for $300M before realizing its potential.

Priced out of existence by the very marketplace it was built to optimize.

Jeff Hawkins neuroscience-inspired AI company spent 14 years on Hierarchical Temporal Memory, laid off most staff in 2019, and became a pure research entity without ever shipping a product.

MIT-born inventory AI sold to Nike before it could prove it could sell to anyone else.

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

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

Retail demand forecasting swallowed whole by an ERP giant before reaching its potential.

Taught the internet to make decisions — eBay bought it and buried it.

Pioneered social Q&A with AI routing — Google bought it for $50M and killed it in 14 months.

It looks like you're writing a failure story. Would you like help with that?

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

Yitu Technology built world-class facial recognition AI for Chinese smart cities and hospitals — then the US Entity List cut off its chip supply, its Hong Kong IPO collapsed, and the company entered a slow zombie death from 2021.

New Zealand's AI startup that Australia absorbed before it could scale

Kazakhstan's AI startup disrupted by the January 2022 protests that shut down Almaty for 3 months

Hong Kong's fintech AI startup that the National Security Law made too risky for its own investors

Oman AI competing against Shell/BP/Total JV AI in oil, Bloomberg/Temenos in banking, Huawei in telecoms, and G42 sovereign AI from UAE targeting Oman government

Banking-as-a-service middleware collapsed leaving 100,000+ end users without access to their funds

Finland's computer vision retail startup acqui-hired before the category matured

Nicaragua AI: same 2021 political crackdown that eliminated fintech investment eliminated AI investment, leaving 10 enterprise AI clients

Vanuatu's AI startup for 12 potential enterprise clients in an island nation of 330,000

Palo Alto's enterprise AI platform was absorbed by Panasonic before the MLOps category existed

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

Banking AI conversational platform made redundant by GPT-4 entering financial services

Scale AI spin-off data labeling platform shut down as parent pivoted to automated labeling

Nepal's AI startup whose engineers left for Qatar and Dubai before the product could reach scale

AI agent developer tools outrun by the platforms they were building on

Saudi Arabic NLP startup displaced when Saudi government funded state AI champions

Azerbaijan's AI startup in a market where the biggest buyer already had Russian and US IT vendors

Freight brokerage tech startup acquired by C.H. Robinson for pennies on the dollar

Cambodia's enterprise AI for 60 companies where Heineken, Axiata, and Hana Financial had already covered the largest players

Argentina's retail analytics AI hollowed out by talent emigration

FDA-cleared AI radiology platform acquired by Tempus AI, absorbed into a larger oncology data business.

AI compliance automation for banks — obsoleted before it could scale

Laos AI for 30 enterprises where Chinese dam contractors, Vietnamese banking, and ZTE had already covered the economy

Gambia's AI startup for the world's smallest non-island state enterprise market

Bangladesh's NLP startup with world-class Bangla models and no paying customers

Tunisia's Arabic NLP startup with state-of-the-art models and no market to sell them to

The Seychelles AI startup for a country with 98,000 people and 5 enterprise AI buyers

Libya's AI startup in a country with two governments and one civil war

Brunei's AI startup for a 450,000-person economy where every major buyer had a parent company

India's precision agriculture AI beaten by government FPO programs with the same capabilities for free

Timor-Leste AI for 8 enterprises where the port uses Singapore PSA AI, the petroleum fund uses Norway's AI, and the bank uses Portuguese CGD parent AI

Tonga's AI startup severed from the world by the largest volcanic eruption of the 21st century

The AI drug discovery pioneer that brought the first AI-designed drugs to trials and was acquired at a 75 percent discount

Guatemala's AI startup outcompeted by US-LatAm platforms before it could build brand

Filipino AI product recommendation engine made redundant by Shopee's and Lazada's native AI features

Indonesia's credit scoring AI acqui-hired as super-apps built the same capability in-house

Guinea's mining AI startup that the September 2021 coup ended in 72 hours

Computer vision for retail shelves — commoditized before it could scale

El Salvador's enterprise AI startup in a market where the Bitcoin Law consumed all the tech budgets

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

Rwanda's AI startup that the government admired and couldn't afford to buy in time

Portugal's NLP startup whose language moat lasted exactly until GPT-3 launched

Costa Rica's B2B AI that ran out of enterprises to sell to

Egypt's Arabic AI startup building through an IMF austerity program

North Macedonia's AI startup that won its domestic market and still failed

Senegal's NLP startup that built the world's best Wolof AI for a market that didn't exist yet

DRC's AI startup in a country where the enterprise market is one city surrounded by unreachable terrain

Nigeria's enterprise AI startup destroyed by naira collapse and AWS payment freezes

Morocco's Arabic AI that the Gulf wanted but couldn't trust from Casablanca

Ecuador's enterprise AI built for a market where oil, banking, and insurance already had parent-company AI contracts

Computer vision for UK retail shrinkage — hyperscaler APIs eliminated the business case

The Romanian AI startup disrupted by the very ecosystem it was part of

Edge AI pioneer for industrial cameras that spent 17 years searching for a scalable market.

The AI+human translation startup that GPT-4 rendered obsolete

Eritrea AI startup for a country with 1.5% internet penetration where all ISPs are state-controlled

Brazilian enterprise AI platform spread too thin across verticals and burned through capital without focus

Bosnia AI competing for a 100-company market fragmented across 2 political entities and 13 cantons, with Serbian and Croatian AI vendors also targeting Sarajevo

South African retail vision AI trapped between a small formal market and global competition

Ford and Volkswagen's $3.6B autonomous vehicle bet was shut down overnight when both automakers decided the market was too far away.

Japan's US-style AI startup that discovered Japanese enterprises buy technology differently

AR/AI unicorn worth $1.5B that went bankrupt over a founder control dispute.

DRC AI for a 100M population country with 15 enterprise AI clients in Kinshasa while eastern DRC conflict disrupted the mining sector

Uzbekistan's AI startup for a state economy that buys technology through government-to-government deals

Australian predictive analytics AI hit TAM ceiling and failed to break into the US market

Cameroon's AI startup that building bilingual products for a bilingual country doubled its costs

Venezuela AI third attempt in Maracaibo — 12-hour blackouts, 85% tech talent emigration, and 20K formal businesses confirm the same structural barriers

Thailand AI second wave: ChatGPT Thai, SCB's 400-person AI team, KBTG (2,000 engineers), and 200+ Thai AI startups competing for 100 enterprise clients

Turkish legal AI startup killed by 85% lira depreciation and ChatGPT disruption simultaneously

Switzerland's banking AI startup that Swiss banks bought from IBM and SAP instead

Georgia's document AI startup that GPT-4 made irrelevant overnight

A data query AI startup that was made obsolete by ChatGPT and the wave of foundation models before it could reach scale.

Ecuador's enterprise AI startup that ChatGPT made redundant at Series A stage

Moldova's AI startup in a country whose economy contracts faster than any product can grow

Paraguay's AI consultancy in a country with twenty potential enterprise clients

Colombia's enterprise AI startup that IT consultancies outbid on every deal

Venezuela's AI startup dismantled by hyperinflation one engineer at a time

Bulgaria's retail AI that validated its product at home and couldn't sell it abroad

Vietnam's retail AI startup overwhelmed by a conglomerate with a private AI lab

Albania's AI startup that EU candidate status didn't help sell to EU enterprises

Bahrain's AI startup used Bahrain as a lab and needed the Gulf as a market — but couldn't afford to move

Mauritius's AI startup that the island's financial hub credentials couldn't convert into an African market

China's enterprise AI caught in the 2021 regulatory wave that froze AI product launches across the country

Niger's AI startup that the 2023 military coup made illegal to fund

Benin's AI startup following BeninFin's structural analysis — same market, different sector, same result

Gabon's AI startup for an oil economy where Total controls the technology decisions

Djibouti's AI startup for a port economy where the Chinese-built port uses Chinese AI

South Korea's NLP startup outresourced by the conglomerates that own the Korean internet

Mali's AI startup that two military coups and French sanctions ended

South Korea AI competing against NAVER HyperClova (300B Korean-language parameters), Kakao AI, Samsung AI team of 2,000, and LG AI Research

UAE AI competing against sovereign-backed G42 ($1.5B+), Emirates NBD's 300-person AI team, and every global AI company using Dubai as their MENA headquarters

Peru's enterprise AI startup beaten by the same IT consultancies that built the banks it was trying to modernize

Fiji's AI startup whose primary market disappeared with the tourist jets

Andorra's AI startup for a 77,000-person duty-free shopping economy

Somalia's AI startup in a country where physical security made office operations intermittently impossible

Italian document AI acqui-hired after Microsoft Syntex absorbed the category

Georgia's enterprise AI competing against Turkish and German AI vendors in a 150-company market

Abidjan's enterprise AI for a market where Bolloré, Total, and French banks had already deployed their parent AI

Startup that hacked McDonald's ice cream machines destroyed by the franchise system

Colombian enterprise NLP acqui-hired after losing the AI positioning battle post-ChatGPT

Pioneered AI video creation for 800+ news publishers — then ChatGPT and Runway ML commoditized AI video in November 2022, and legacy media clients cut budgets simultaneously

Kuwait enterprise AI where oil companies used Shell/BP parent AI, banks used Bloomberg/Temenos, and UAE AI companies competed for the same 100 clients

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

Bolivia AI for 20 enterprises where YPFB uses Russian bilateral AI, Tigo uses Millicom parent, and 60% of the population is in indigenous subsistence economy

Ukrainian e-commerce AI startup that built exceptional technology and was destroyed by the 2022 invasion

Thai medical AI platform burned through capital as hospital adoption lagged and GPT disrupted the market

The stealth AI company that raised 143 million dollars and quietly disappeared without explanation

Uber's AI research lab — brilliant work, no business model, eliminated in the COVID cost cuts

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

AI for insurance claims automation — Verisk and Guidewire absorbed the category

A checkout-free AI startup that raised $73M retrofitting major retailers and was swept away in the autonomous checkout category collapse.

A $196M autonomous checkout startup killed when Amazon reversed its Amazon Go expansion and killed the entire category.

AI scheduling assistant Amy/Andrew that raised $44M and was quietly acquired and shuttered.

Chinese budget EV maker survived only through Stellantis bailout after brutal price war

Homeowners insurance insurtech raised $162M then watched climate losses destroy its loss ratio

Australian document AI for financial services — Microsoft Syntex arrived and the category collapsed

Mexican AI copilot for SMEs built a product that ChatGPT made obsolete 18 months after launch

MLOps pioneer acquired by DataRobot and discontinued as the enterprise AI platform market consolidated.

Belarus's AI startup that Lukashenko's crackdown made an international pariah

Botswana's AI startup for a market dominated by one industry that buys its technology from De Beers

Portuguese conversational AI startup disrupted by ChatGPT before closing its Series A

Bosnia's AI startup for a country that required two legal entities and had 15 potential clients

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

Retail shelf-scanning robots deployed in 500 Walmart stores were cancelled overnight when Walmart decided humans were cheaper.

Cabo Verde's AI startup for an island economy of 500,000 people where the hotels use Portuguese IT

Japanese document AI startup acqui-hired after failing to crack enterprise sales

Romanian enterprise data AI acqui-hired after being trapped between Eastern European market and Western European competition

Vietnamese AI analytics platform priced out of its own market by global SaaS giants

Chilean mining AI platform acqui-hired after reaching TAM ceiling in the local copper sector

Dominican Republic's enterprise AI startup in a country where the biggest industry buys tech from Miami

Polish precision agriculture AI that couldn't reach enough farmers before the runway ran out

Britain's most celebrated AI chip startup raised $750M and was sold to SoftBank at a valuation far below its $2.8B peak as NVIDIA's dominance proved unassailable.

Indian AI recruiting tool made redundant by ChatGPT and LinkedIn's own AI features

AI home valuation analytics startup absorbed by Zillow's dominant AVM model

Pakistan's banking AI startup beaten by Indian IT outsourcers it could not outprice

Cash-offer homebuying platform imploded when rates made the inventory model nonviable

India's edtech AI that the category bubble inflated and then deflated around it

Mobile carrier financial identity startup raised $72M but carriers never deployed at scale

Jordan enterprise AI competing against Egyptian, Lebanese, and UAE AI companies in a 200-company market while UN agencies covered the refugee tech opportunity

Belgian logistics AI acqui-hired after failing to break out of the Benelux market

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

Kosovo's AI startup for a market with 8 enterprise buyers and international investors who said no

Monaco's AI startup for the world's wealthiest microstate — where the wealthy buy AI from Geneva and London

Computational photography AI hardware startup raised $121M for a revolutionary multi-lens camera that never found a mass market.

Liechtenstein's AI startup for a principality with 38,000 people and 7 enterprise AI buyers

AI hyperrealistic video startup behind the viral Tom Cruise deepfakes that could not build a commercial model.

Myanmar's enterprise AI startup that the military coup killed on the same day as MyanPay

PNG's AI startup for a resource economy where ExxonMobil and Barrick control 60% of the economy's technology purchases

LA's IoT cold chain startup discovered that global health NGO contracts cannot sustain a venture-funded technology company

Israeli document AI for financial compliance drowned in enterprise sales cycles

Togo's AI startup in the smallest West African economy that could reasonably call itself an AI market

Austria's document AI startup outspent by US competitors on their way through Europe

Ukrainian AI automation startup destroyed by Russian invasion before reaching Series B

Taiwanese AI quality inspection platform hit TAM ceiling in SME manufacturing market

Malaysian NLP consulting firm turned product company disrupted before the pivot completed

The ML experiment tracking platform that was commoditized by cloud providers and open-source tools before it could build a defensible position

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

Germany most celebrated AI company advised the G7 on artificial intelligence — but could not make its own enterprise automation software pay its bills.

Dutch data pipeline AI platform acqui-hired as Snowflake and Databricks commoditized the market

Swedish medical AI for radiology ran out of capital waiting for EU MDR certification

Cannabis dispensary marketing software stalled as legalization timeline disappointed

Zimbabwe's AI startup destroyed by the same currency instability its customers were trying to survive

MIT-born emotion AI pioneer acquired by Smart Eye — a cautionary tale of niche AI 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

AI lending platform pivoted three times before abandoning direct lending entirely

Mongolia AI for 70 enterprises where Rio Tinto, the IMF, and US banking parent companies already covered the primary clients

The government AI intelligence platform that raised 133 million dollars and was disrupted by ChatGPT

Maldives AI for 530K people on 1,200 islands where the only enterprise market is resort hotels using Oracle and Opera PMS

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

Equatorial Guinea's AI startup for the Spanish-speaking African country with 3 potential clients

The behavioral AI coaching platform for call centers that raised 100 million dollars before ChatGPT made it irrelevant

Kenya's AI startup that blitzscaled into 8 African markets before the product was ready

North Macedonia AI — same 60-company market from the fintech analysis, now with Serbian/Albanian AI companies also competing, and Slovenian/Serbian parent AI covering the primary targets

Jamaica AI for a 3M population where banks, telecoms, and resorts all use parent company AI while 2.8M diaspora in the USA is larger than the resident market

Industrial AI for German manufacturing quality control — great technology, impossible enterprise sales cycle

Russian computer vision AI startup destroyed by sanctions and engineering team exodus after the Ukraine invasion

Honduras's AI startup that won the entire addressable market and still couldn't survive

Kyrgyzstan AI for 20 enterprise clients while MegaCom uses Russian bilateral AI, KICB uses Japanese parent AI, and the Russian migration wave disrupted the tech economy

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

Namibia's AI startup for a market with 10 enterprise buyers and 8 of them shopping in Johannesburg

Panama's enterprise AI built for a market where the Canal uses IBM, Copa uses Sabre, and the banks use Spanish parent AI

Venezuela AI second attempt confirming 85% professional emigration, monthly blackouts, PDVSA using Russian/Cuban tech, and USD still formally unrecognized

Trinidad's AI startup for an energy economy that buys technology from Houston

Croatia's retail AI startup caught between a market too small and a continent too competitive

Ethiopian crop prediction AI destroyed by Tigray conflict and agricultural disruption

Bolivia's AI startup that only the government could afford to buy — and the government didn't

The AI startup that tried to sell automation to the world's most automated country

Electric transit bus pioneer bankrupt as Chinese competition and supply chain costs overwhelmed

Cuba's AI startup that OFAC made structurally illegal before it could ship a product

Mexican AI brand analytics startup made redundant when ChatGPT made brand insights free

Thai enterprise chatbot builder displaced by ChatGPT in six months

Norwegian process mining AI absorbed into the Microsoft fabric before achieving scale

Korean synthetic data startup made obsolete by the LLM era before Series A closed

AI-powered personalized portfolio management for RIAs raised $65M but could not hold clients

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.

Sudan's AI startup caught between a revolution and a sanctions regime

Synthetic data startup for AI training raised $17M and shut down as foundation models disrupted its market.

Mexico's health AI startup blocked by procurement frameworks it couldn't access

Turkey's enterprise computer vision startup destroyed by the lira collapse, not the competition

Italy's enterprise AI that Italian enterprises refused to buy Italian

Ecuador's enterprise AI blocked by SAP bank contracts and Halliburton oil agreements

AGI research lab outpaced by the very wave it was studying

Slovakia's industrial AI beaten by the German supply chain hierarchy

Iraq's AI startup for a banking sector frozen in pre-2003 legacy systems with no upgrade path

Ivory Coast's agriculture AI that needed the cocoa industry to care about algorithms

India's enterprise AI startup outchanneled by the IT giants that built the banks it was trying to serve

China's computer vision AI startup grounded by US export controls before it could reach scale

Social robot Moxie for children raised $22M and shut down without warning in October 2024.

Angola enterprise AI for the oil state economy where Sonangol uses BP/Total parent AI and Unitel uses Huawei

Madagascar's AI startup in a country where $500 GDP per capita eliminates enterprise technology demand

South Korea's enterprise AI that Samsung, LG, and SK's IT subsidiaries outchanneled before it could build brand

India healthcare AI competing against Apollo's internal AI team, PharmEasy ($1.5B), Practo ($230M), and 100+ Indian healthcare AI startups for 50 corporate hospital chains

Peru AI second attempt in Arequipa: ChatGPT commoditized NLP, Lima banks integrated Azure OpenAI, Southern Copper used parent AI, and 8 presidential changes disrupted government procurement

Enterprise AI writing assistant raised $200M but faced impossible competition from GPT-4 wrappers

AI enterprise service desk unicorn sold to ServiceNow as LLMs commoditized the category

South African AI identity verification platform hit TAM ceiling and lost to global API providers