Marketplace Startup Failures

India's packaging procurement unicorn hopeful destroyed by MSME bad debt and funding winter.

PO collaboration marketplace squeezed out by SAP Ariba and enterprise procurement suites.

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

Supply chain marketplace that Tiger Global backed at peak panic and sold at discount in calm.

The Tier 2 kirana distributor that fought Udaan and Jio and ran out of money paying its own staff.

Restaurant GPO marketplace crushed by its own $180M LBO debt as rates rose.

European metals marketplace that processed €200M GMV before the steel slump killed it.

A marketplace nobody wanted to join—least of all the vendors with the data.

On-demand storage raised $300M but couldn't crack last-mile economics

The $40B Southeast Asia super-app SPAC that fell 75% before its first profitable quarter

The 3D printing bureau that BASF bought, then buried inside its chemical empire.

A geopolitical war sank a maritime marketplace.

A pet-sitting marketplace that survived the pandemic but couldn't survive the aftermath.

A joyful wedding app that couldn't survive when weddings stopped.

Indonesia's super-app merger IPO'd at $28B then sold its crown jewel to TikTok

Indian pharma B2B marketplace undone by warehouse fraud and margin wars with distributors.

An a16z-backed creator collab marketplace killed by TikTok's native tools.

One million massages delivered — then AB5 regulation and COVID habits ended the party.

China's used-car unicorn IPO'd on NASDAQ for $225M and then unraveled via fraud allegations.

The $3.2B home services marketplace that couldn't solve the offline trust problem

SoftBank's favourite Indian unicorn raised $3.2B to aggregate budget hotels globally—then fired 50% of its workforce and wrote down its valuation from $9B to under $3B.

SoftBank-backed AI procurement marketplace that burned $300M without sustainable economics.

Office fitout marketplace whose entire market evaporated with remote work adoption.

Argentina's home services marketplace ran out of capital expanding across four LatAm countries before any single one was profitable

The Airbnb for science experiments ran out of runway before labs ran out of needs.

The delivery app that built its model on gig workers. Spain's Ley Rider said no.

Trade intelligence marketplace outcompeted by legacy players and squeezed on margins.

Brazil's first gig economy marketplace IPO'd on B3 at R$600M. Then Workana, Fiverr and Getwork destroyed it.

The rural kirana digitizer that outlasted a decade but couldn't outlast the giants.

P2P car sharing with $300M from SoftBank. Insurance costs and maintenance ate every dollar. Filed Chapter 11 in December 2023.

East Africa's leading logistics platform ran out of runway in 2023

Delivery Hero sold Foodpanda's Asia business. Delivery economics never profitable.

A pandemic unicorn that discovered celebrity shoutouts were a fad, not a market.

Valencia on-demand laundry startup announced a 90M EUR round that never closed — then stopped paying 157 employees for 9 months before filing bankruptcy in 2023

Survived COVID only to bleed out from the recovery it couldn't afford to fund.

Restaurant supply marketplace that pivoted to groceries and ran out of runway.

A venue booking pioneer smothered under a burger delivery giant's balance sheet.

Scotland's indie fashion champion couldn't survive when boutique suppliers closed faster than new ones joined.

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

UK hospitality procurement platform that inflation and fragmentation slowly dismantled.

Andreessen Horowitz-backed B2B wholesale marketplace for Mexican small retailers — shut in 2023 after failing to displace the informal tianguis supply chain.

Colombian B2B hardware-store marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, and General Atlantic with $180M raised — executed multiple mass layoff rounds before winding down in 2023.

AgriTech marketplace for Latin America. Mexico ops shut down.

Daily deals pioneer rejected Google's $6B offer. Stock fell 97%. CEO fired via shareholder letter. From 12,000 employees to under 500.

Latin America's freelance marketplace. Upwork went global. Workana restructured.

Mexico's venture-backed used-car marketplace that could not survive the 2022 funding winter — reconditioning and logistics costs never reached viable unit economics.

11 years of human-plus-AI styling couldn't crack the conversion problem that makes fashion personalization profitable.

Latin America's super-app. Raised $2B. Laid off 6% and restructured.

Survived every worker lawsuit only to surrender its marketplace soul to big-box retail.

One hundred fifty thousand vendors listed, but most refused to pay the platform that listed them.

German families refused to trust algorithms with care home decisions for their parents

Austria's boot-sale classifieds app was acquired by Scout24 for €204M and then quietly wound down as the parent pivoted away

Peer-to-peer moving sounded great until 50 thin markets outweighed one dense one.

Singapore food wholesale marketplace that survived COVID subsidies but not the recovery.

Naspers's classifieds giant quietly exited Argentina after 15 years as Facebook Marketplace and MercadoLibre ate its core market

4 million couples, 25 countries, and one pandemic that broke the entire international wedding dream.

Brazilian SME marketplace unicorn. Post-COVID ecommerce normalization. 350 layoffs.

India's home services unicorn. Workers protested. Gig economy reckoning.

Industrial MRO marketplace that burned $18M chasing thin-margin transactions.

Brazil's truck strike gave them their best pitch ever; inflation killed their customers' budgets.

India's B2B FMCG marketplace that couldn't survive the Udaan avalanche.

Mexico's first $8.7B unicorn that discovered used cars have very thin margins

The $63B used car unicorn bought a $2.2B auction house at the exact top of the used car bubble

SoftBank's Brazilian logistics unicorn shrank faster than it scaled after the easy-money era ended

Restaurant wholesale marketplace that never achieved delivery density in the US market.

Brexit wiped out the care workforce that UK eldercare marketplaces depended on

Canadian office supply marketplace crushed by Amazon Business expansion.

London's most hyped IPO in years became its worst first-day performance in decades

Brazil's mobile tech conglomerate. iFood spun out. What remained was unclear.

The B2B steel marketplace that couldn't bend the old-boy trader network to go digital.

A critical minerals marketplace where 83 of 87 suppliers never closed a single deal.

Germany's wedding marketplace survived two world wars but not one pandemic media rollup.

Chile's grocery delivery unicorn. Acquired by Uber. Absorbed into Uber Eats.

Free platform tools and COVID budget freezes ended a nine-year influencer marketplace.

A niche carved with purpose, eroded when everyone else claimed the same purpose.

Twitter's first creator bet, quietly killed six years after the $30M acquisition.

Spain's pet-sitting champion that COVID-19 destroyed in 72 hours.

Argentina's last-mile pickup network. MercadoEnvíos won.

Last-minute tickets for a world that had no events left to be last-minute about.

The OpenTable of nightclubs closed when nightclubs closed—and never reopened.

UK's social ticketing app for millennials ran out of events—and runway.

Australia's design marketplace. Vista acquired it. Independent trajectory ended.

Built for love, destroyed by a pandemic it had no contingency plan for.

UK's flexible gym marketplace erased in a single government lockdown order.

Disrupting fish auctions when fish auctions are legally protected.

Two thousand eight hundred venues listed, zero events happening.

5 million users, zero revenue model, and one pandemic away from oblivion.

The daily-deals giant's Argentine unit was among the last LatAm markets abandoned as the category died globally

The classifieds app that raised 500M USD from Naspers and OLX. Then Naspers merged it with OLX.

Manila's home-services gig app was wiped out in days by COVID-19 lockdowns.

Healthcare supply marketplace that couldn't crack GPO lock-in contracts.

Burning €45 to acquire customers spending €22 is not a business model, it's a donation.

The Airbnb for designer clothes met the worst possible moment for renting outfits.

Fair-price sports ticketing marketplace wiped out when COVID cancelled the entire season.

Launched 8 weeks before the pandemic killed weddings; funded, smart, and perfectly timed to fail.

Brazilian same-day delivery. iFood and Rappi arrived with billions. Rapiddo didn't.

Pioneered crowdsourced creativity but couldn't monetize what it helped invent.

Chile's grocery delivery unicorn. Uber acquired it and eventually absorbed it.

Fans demanded concerts everywhere; almost no one got the concert they demanded.

Pioneer of AI data labeling that got squeezed between Amazon and Silicon Valley's hottest startup.

Germany's food delivery pioneer. Delivery Hero sold it because Lieferando won.

The interior design marketplace that ghosted 3,000 designers and their paychecks overnight.

A wedding platform that forgot vendors also need a reason to pay.

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

Lost in translation — the freelance interpreter marketplace that couldn't speak enterprise.

Britain's home-delivery used car startup ran out of road before Cazoo made the model famous.

The Airbnb for bulldozers — acquired before the market was ready to share.

India's home services gig platform crushed between giants and brutal unit economics.

The peer-to-peer used car marketplace that burned $150 million and never solved operations

Amazon's $175M investment. GroupOn's $0 acquisition. Daily deals were a mirage.

YC-backed peer car sales ran on manual labor that could never be automated cheaply enough to survive.

Right idea, wrong war chest — outspent into extinction by better-funded rivals.

The Uber for senior care was killed by one California labor ruling that reclassified all its caregivers.

Spain leading food delivery marketplace was acquired by Rocket Internet for 80M EUR — which then discovered growth was built on unsustainable discounts, not organic demand

On-demand laundry pickup proved that dry-cleaning economics can't support a tech company

A web-based buy and sell platform for users to trade goods and digitally created content.

Justin Kan's errand app sold for $10M then killed—proof that on-demand everything doesn't pencil out.

Home cleaning marketplace killed by worker misclassification lawsuits

Crowdsourced invention platform raised $185M but couldn't manufacture profitably

Google built a marketplace for video expert consultations. 14 months later, it was gone.

The $38M home cleaning marketplace killed by worker misclassification lawsuits before it could scale

Spain's classifieds search engine. Acquired by Japan. Dismantled.

Built the social layer for barcodes, then discovered nobody was going to scan anything.

The B2B marketplace that GM and Ford built together — and then abandoned

GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler built the world's biggest B2B marketplace together. It reached $2B then collapsed.

Chemdex hit a $9 billion market cap. Renamed to Ventro. Burned through $350M. Sold for scraps.

A $10 billion marketplace for lab supplies that buyers refused to use

The $8B B2B chemical exchange that suppliers refused to use.

Reverse auctions were supposed to flip procurement — buyers never showed up

El Salvador's services marketplace couldn't scale past home services into a sustainable platform

Egyptian B2B commerce startup that collapsed in eighteen months amid allegations of financial fraud after raising $33M.

The Southeast Asian used car unicorn that lost 100 million dollars and had to cut a third of its team

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

Brazilian DTC fashion startup that raised $55M and built 10 physical stores before filing for bankruptcy in 2023.

Spain's leading flash-sales and travel deals site was acquired by Groupon then quietly shut down as the category died.

E-commerce for Central Africa's wealthiest small economy — wealthy per capita, tiny by volume

Home services marketplace that could not find sustainable unit economics in Brazil.

French home services marketplace defeated by French labor law

Chilean flea market and second-hand goods platform — Mercado Libre absorbed the category

Chilean B2B procurement marketplace displaced by Amazon Business and Alibaba's global push

Spain's daily-deals pioneer faded into obscurity as Groupon and market saturation killed the category.

Spanish event ticketing platform acquired by Eventbrite in 2018 and quietly wound down a year later.

Commercial furniture B2B marketplace found procurement budgets dried up post-COVID

Joint venture between XL Axiata and SK Planet raised hundreds of millions to become a top Indonesian marketplace and surrendered after eight years.

German local business directory that raised $20M and was killed by Google My Business.

A Bezos and Sequoia-backed B2B warung commerce platform that could not crack informal retail economics in Indonesia.

London on-demand laundry pickup and delivery startup raised 4 million pounds and shut down after five years when it proved impossible to make dirty clothes economically viable.

Colombian grocery delivery marketplace absorbed by Rappi after burning through $10M unable to compete with a better-funded rival.

Homejoy's founder tried to fix the original's mistakes and COVID eliminated the market before she could

The Cuban diaspora marketplace that US sanctions wouldn't allow to exist

Decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace raised $9M and attracted only darknet use cases

An office lunch subscription startup that built a restaurant partnership network and was killed permanently when office workers never returned.

Construction equipment rental marketplace stalled at pilot stage

The photo marketplace that couldn't outshoot Getty

Botswana's classifieds and services platform was limited by the country's 2 million population ceiling

Malaysian-backed Indian classifieds giant raised $300M, left 4,000 employees unpaid in August 2016, and became a cautionary tale about foreign capital misallocated into Indian ecommerce.

Berlin's on-demand home cleaning unicorn hopeful filed for insolvency after raising €25M, unable to make the economics work.

West Africa's regional commodity marketplace — too small to sustain, too real to abandon

Berlin online luxury art auction platform raised €100M and went bankrupt amid shill bidding scandal

Nigerian B2B FMCG distribution platform retreated as naira crisis destroyed retailer purchasing power

Hamburg Airbnb competitor raised 12 million euros, survived eight years in the shadow of Airbnb, and was absorbed by Wimdu right before both shut down.

Spanish group buying platform that rode the Groupon wave to $32M raised, then slowly died as the entire daily deals category collapsed.

The vacation rental marketplace that Airbnb outspent and outlisted before Roomorama could scale

Iraq's first true e-commerce marketplace — beaten by cash and conflict

Spain's home improvement marketplace acquired by Houzz and wound down after a decade.

Nairobi ethical fashion marketplace connecting artisans to global buyers ran out of margin

GoMechanic raised $62M to digitize car repair in India — then the co-founder publicly admitted inflating revenues by 2.5x and Sequoia wrote off the entire investment

Indian B2B commerce unicorn that raised 350 million dollars at a 3 billion dollar valuation to connect manufacturers to retailers and entered zombie mode after deep cuts.

A gig staffing app for hospitality workers that grew during COVID recovery and collapsed when the staffing market normalized.

Australian short-term rental management platform eliminated by Airbnb's own host tools

Dog walking marketplace that raised $300M from SoftBank and was delisted from Nasdaq by 2024.

Sequoia-backed custom packaging startup squeezed by commodity inflation

Furlenco raised $75M to make furniture rental mainstream in India — then learned that furniture that is rented, returned, and re-rented has damage economics that destroy every margin assumption

Indian dot-com classifieds portal that raised millions to digitize Yellow Pages in 1998 internet India.

Mexican used car unicorn entered Chile and exited 3 years later burning cash

San Francisco peer-to-peer storage and rental platform raised $55M to monetize unused belongings and closed when people decided they preferred to keep their stuff.

Haiti's first digital goods marketplace — killed by gang violence and political collapse

Spain's pioneering secondhand children's clothing marketplace raised €10M then quietly shut down as Vinted took the European market.

Kenyan B2B last-mile retail commerce platform backed by Tiger Global that raised 40 million dollars and shut down in 2023 after failing to crack informal retail economics.

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

Indonesian super-app that merged with Tokopedia, raised $13B+, and still could not beat Grab and Shopee.

Paraguayan e-commerce marketplace displaced by MercadoLibre's aggressive Paraguayan expansion

Chilean on-demand home services marketplace that failed to find sustainable unit economics despite multiple pivots.

A clever restaurant coworking startup acquired by WeWork in 2019 and shut down in COVID, the ultimate acquirer-dependent casualty.

Rocket Internet's home cleaning play that never found profitable repeat economics

Spain's leading restaurant reservation platform acquired by TheFork (TripAdvisor) and retired in favor of the global brand.

Uruguay's local e-commerce champion — Mercado Libre absorbed the category before it could scale

SoftBank-backed B2B wholesale app connecting small retailers to brands raised $60M and shut down as distributech economics proved unworkable.

Argentina's leading restaurant booking platform acquired by OpenTable and silently wound down.

Bolivian quick-commerce startup that couldn't build a delivery network on a shoestring

Time-banking P2P skills marketplace could not monetize the altruistic economy

A Tiger Global-backed B2B commerce platform that burned $30M trying to digitize Pakistani kirana stores.

A restaurant booking platform acquired by Recruit Holdings for $200M and shut down during COVID as its acquirer deprioritized the category.

Malaysian online classifieds leader that dominated for a decade before being disrupted by social commerce.

B2B auction network raised $130M to out-network eBay and lost to the network effects it could not replicate.

Dot-com B2B vertical portals empire raised $400M at $12B peak and filed bankruptcy in 2002

B2B wholesale marketplace for South African informal retailers — outcompeted by Wasoko

London luxury fashion marketplace that reached a $20B valuation and raised $1.7B before Coupang rescued it for $500M — a 97.5% value destruction.

Egyptian used car marketplace that raised 12 million dollars to bring Carvana-style online auto retail to the Middle East and shut down within two years.

The Portuguese luxury fashion marketplace that IPO-ed at $6 billion and filed for bankruptcy in 2023 after never finding a path to profitability despite raising over $1 billion

Porto's local services marketplace couldn't build network density against Uniplaces and international platforms

Favo brought social commerce group-buying to Latin America and raised $7.5M from Tiger Global — but the model that worked in China collapsed in Peru

The boutique indie shop marketplace that Amazon made irrelevant

Professionalizing Cuba's informal economy through mobile commerce — state-crushed

Spanish fashion social network that peaked early and slowly faded as Pinterest and Instagram made it redundant.

The Colombian super-app that SoftBank valued at 3.5 billion dollars and that has been burning cash for a decade

Ecuador's homegrown e-commerce platform swallowed by giants

Rocket Internet Airbnb clone raised 90 million euros and folded seven years later when Airbnb proved that network effects cannot be bought.

Argentina's daily deals clone that couldn't outlast Groupon's retreat

Cross-border trade platform for East African informal traders could not sustain the model

UK's fan-to-fan ticket marketplace raised $35M, was acquired by Ticketmaster, then shut down when Ticketmaster decided it competed with itself.

Lagos's social commerce app couldn't survive Jumia and Konga's marketplace dominance

Spain's wedding marketplace that couldn't monetize the happiest day of your life

Used car buying and selling platform backed by Prosus and OLX that attempted to build a Carvana-style business in the Indian used car market