SaaS Startup Failures

The web knowledge graph AI — LLMs made its core value proposition available for free.

Brazil's SaaS acquisition rollup that discovered the hard way that buy-and-integrate is harder than buy-and-pray

Economic signal forecasting killed by the most economically unpredictable era in decades.

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

The customer success category creator that couldn't create enough exit value

The design platform that Figma made obsolete

Digital twin startup for cities couldn't compete with GIS giants and ran out of cash.

LiDAR robots caught every construction defect except the one in the business model.

From $7B direct listing darling to 90% market cap wipeout

Design-to-developer handoff tool erased by Figma Dev Mode

The enterprise CXM unicorn that IPO'd at $7.7B and compressed 75% as multiples normalized.

Sold tomorrow's regulatory mandate today—but tomorrow never came.

The computer vision pioneer that hyperscalers commoditized — when cloud giants bundle vision APIs for free, the market disappears.

Oracle released a free version of VaultShift's entire business.

The open-source Slack alternative — caught between Microsoft Teams free and Slack's mindshare.

Great Product Hunt launch, wrong unit economics — 800 users at $12 ARPU doesn't build a company.

35,000 small businesses woke up on Dec 27 to find their accountant had vanished overnight.

Government NLP platform ran into a budget freeze and Palantir's legal army simultaneously.

Built the perfect TCFD compliance tool for regulations that kept shrinking or not arriving.

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

No-code data pipelines for non-engineers, disrupted by AI before reaching scale.

Polish CI/CD underdog ran out of runway when GitHub Actions made pipelines free for millions.

A quantum software darling backed by Goldman and Airbus that quietly gave up on quantum.

The $135M Berlin presentation software startup crushed between Canva and AI-native competitors

The beautiful form builder — hit the PLG ceiling when Google Forms remained free.

A $500M enterprise automation unicorn undone by budget freezes and incumbent competition.

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

The celebrity AI startup with a $24B valuation — still searching for the product differentiation that justifies it.

The knowledge wiki that got caught between a $10B Notion and a resurgent Confluence.

Claimed AI beats McKinsey — clients gave it an NPS of 4.

The $2.6B revenue platform that couldn't forecast its own revenue collapse.

€34M and 350 employees weren't enough to crack the European helpdesk market.

The conversational marketing pioneer raised $107M at $1B and was acquired for a fraction in a Salesloft fire sale

ZoomInfo's $575M acquisition became a slow-motion product sunset

Predicting arrivals when the carriers gave the data away for free.

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

The $1.7B product management unicorn that the market didn't need at that price

MIT-born factory floor no-code platform ran out of runway when industrial spending froze.

Climate scenario modeling for mandates that courts and politics refused to mandate.

Climate-forward urban planning tool shut down as government tech budgets evaporated.

The construction site SaaS that couldn't make Indian contractors pay for what WhatsApp gives for free.

The carbon accounting startup that couldn't survive the ESG backlash and market crowding.

Procurement SaaS couldn't outrun Coupa and Ramp in the race for mid-market CFO wallets.

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

The BI unicorn that spent $800M to build a category already owned by Tableau and Salesforce.

Developer darling of internal tools, acqui-hired by Airtable after $32M spent.

The grocery retail media darling squeezed out by the giants it was built to serve around.

The async work OS that couldn't find its place between Notion and Slack.

Built for Korean semiconductor supply chains — then US export controls rewrote the rules every 6 months.

AI matchmaking for events couldn't find a match for its own survival.

Bootstrapped database-app builder couldn't survive Airtable's free tier juggernaut.

AI turned browser automation from a no-code superpower into an obsolete workaround in 12 months.

Austin's quantum aggregator platform burned $24M before quantum hardware made it irrelevant.

Shelf analytics ambition collided with Nielsen's enterprise sales machine.

India's PDP Bill withdrawal killed a data lineage startup that bet its survival on regulatory timing.

Elsevier bought the world's best research collaboration tool and spent a decade slowly dismantling it.

Andreessen-backed community platform shut down 18 months after Series A.

The supply chain risk monitor that couldn't monitor its own survival risk.

The remote manager's co-pilot that ran out of fuel before enterprise sales cycles completed.

Tried to out-feature ServiceNow with 1% of the budget.

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

Raised $120M to serve vets, then hiked prices 60% and lost 800 clinics in 90 days.

Automated data marketplace crushed between GDPR hammers and CCPA nails before it could scale.

The remote-work document collaboration startup raised $9M then shut down as Notion won the category

Raised $26M to extract the web's data, then competitors extracted their market share.

Priced above Fivetran with a worse product — 14 investors said no.

Fifteen years of honest accounting software, undone by a free competitor and a saturated market.

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

Award-winning loyalty platform for KFC and Benefit Cosmetics couldn't survive its own sales cycle.

The IT management platform for SMBs that raised $200M, lost its customer base in the 2022 tech downturn, and cut half its workforce

YC pedigree, $25M raised, and a founder misconduct scandal that no CFO service could clean up.

The $7.75B virtual events unicorn that COVID created and the post-pandemic world destroyed

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

Grew from flowers to everything wedding, and wilted under the weight of it all.

Tried to automate the unmigrateable — and broke Barclays in the process.

The $112M observability platform built on Elasticsearch that couldn't survive the commoditization of its own foundation

The startup financial planning platform raised $26M then got crushed between Anaplan and ChatGPT

German SEO analytics pioneer outlasted the dot-com era only to be commoditized out of existence by better-funded rivals.

Australia's mapping darling went too big, too fast in the US and got swallowed whole.

The CRM startup that Meta paid $1B+ to acquire in 2022 and sold 18 months later for a reported $130M — a 90% value destruction inside one of the world's largest tech companies

A decade building smart senior living tech, stranded when the growth round never came.

EU CSRD delayed two years for SMEs. ImpactVise had two weeks of runway left.

The pixel-art virtual office raised $77M during COVID — and discovered that nobody wants to move a virtual avatar to a meeting

The virtual events platform that became a $7.75B unicorn during the COVID lockdowns — sold to RingCentral for $15M in 2023 after in-person events resumed.

Europe's $3.8B communications API unicorn imploded after a chaotic acquisition spree and governance crisis

Specialty retail's cloud POS darling couldn't survive the Shopify steamroller.

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

ChatGPT made a 12-year freelance content marketplace obsolete in under 12 months.

Loyalty SaaS for restaurants that couldn't retain loyalty from restaurants.

The virtual events platform raised 1B at 7.75B valuation during COVID lockdowns and sold its main product for 15M as in-person events returned.

A virtual office that couldn't survive the end of the remote work honeymoon.

OneUp promised to beat QuickBooks at everything. It couldn't beat Wave's free price tag.

A government API change took 6 weeks to break what took 3 years to build.

The Brazilian e-commerce platform that IPO'd at 3.5B in 2021 and traded at 90% below IPO by 2023 as post-ZIRP multiples collapsed.

Built the product regulators demanded—then regulators blinked.

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

Twelve years of bootstrapped progress erased in months by a $17B competitor.

Fifteen years building the virtual office, outlasted by startups born the year COVID hit.

Amazon's own seller tools made Zentail's multichannel magic unnecessary.

Turned Figma designs into apps — but couldn't turn community love into enterprise revenue.

Rebranded three times, never found the right community platform identity.

A $2B no-code unicorn that couldn't code its way out of a revenue crisis.

Invented 'community-led growth' as a category, then couldn't survive the SaaS downturn.

A $53M-funded event marketing platform absorbed into a competitor after COVID broke the market.

Inventory intelligence for small retailers wiped out by the platforms they were built to serve.

Lockheed Martin used it. Scale didn't come fast enough.

OKR and strategy execution SaaS raised $81M from Andreessen Horowitz and raised the "Results-as-a-Service" category—then shut down operations in 2023 after 10 years without finding durable enterprise product-market fit.

The connected car data marketplace that went public via SPAC then delisted and wound down within two years

The B2B data enrichment platform that was once the independent standard for lead intelligence — acquired by HubSpot as the market commoditized

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

Japan's AI marketing darling went from IPO star to penny stock in 18 months.

Digital freight forwarding for Latin America. It rode the COVID shipping boom straight into the bust.

Built mobile-first support but couldn't outrun the giants.

Built a bridge to Salesforce — then Salesforce built its own.

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

Former NSA Director's cybersecurity company. SPAC at $1.2B. Chapter 11 in September 2023.

Raised $1B at $7.75B valuation during COVID. Sold for $15M when the world went back to in-person events.

The 'Peloton of scholastic esports' that couldn't survive post-COVID budget cuts.

LexisNexis raised prices 340% on the data that powered 60% of their product — then it was over.

City data regulator for scooters collapsed when scooter companies themselves imploded.

Built on Airtable's ecosystem, killed when Airtable cloned their product.

Finland's iGaming personalization pioneer was squeezed out by enterprise giants and niche specialists alike.

Canadian dealer tech darling crushed between entrenched incumbents that could outlast any startup's runway.

Palantir's Asia expansion crushed this supply chain geopolitical risk startup overnight.

The product analytics startup valued at $900M in 2021 — acquired by Contentsquare for ~$200M in 2023 as Amplitude and PostHog ate the market from both ends

Optimized ports, unoptimized business model.

A quantum software startup that pivoted to GenAI, went public via SPAC, and died within 90 days of listing.

Session replay unicorn that burned through growth-at-all-costs

Digitized construction bidding just as rate hikes froze the job site.

The wedding pro's favorite SaaS tool couldn't survive when its users' businesses died.

Salesforce paid $750M for collaborative documents — then acquired Slack for $27.7B and absorbed Quip's features into the Slack ecosystem, discontinuing Quip as a standalone product

BCG built 100 startups for clients but couldn't prove any of them would survive without subsidy.

Rode the COVID digital wave and drowned when the tide went out.

The voice AI contact center specialist — commoditized by GPT-4 and Whisper before reaching enterprise scale.

The digital whiteboard that raised $118M at $2B — then FigJam and Miro took the market and cut 12% of staff twice

The AI-powered sales note-taking unicorn raised $200M at $1B then collapsed as ChatGPT made the product free

Virtual events unicorn. $7.75B during COVID. Events returned. Hopin sold for $15M.

Sweden's live video commerce platform lost 97% of its value as brands proved unwilling to pay for interactive shopping

Norway's Arctic data vault startup preserved humanity's knowledge but couldn't preserve itself.

Adobe paid $1B to NOT buy Figma — the most expensive failed acquisition in tech history

A $100M identity platform killed by its own government's competition.

Voice-first async communication killed by the platform it tried to replace.

Tried to out-ESG Bloomberg with £12M and an algorithm. Bloomberg noticed nothing.

Kubernetes CI/CD pioneer swallowed by Datadog as free alternatives killed its market.

Standalone API monitoring company made irrelevant as observability giants bundled its product for free.

Built for teams too small for the big players — then the big players came for them anyway.

A Polish beauty-tech unicorn candidate burned $30M chasing enterprise clients it couldn't keep.

SaaS for senior living couldn't dislodge legacy EHR giants in the enterprise segment

Windows CI specialist bootstrapped for a decade before Microsoft's free Azure Pipelines made it unviable.

Sequoia-backed internal tool builder shut down in a market Retool already owned.

Southeast Asia's quantum software pioneer dissolved when no bank could find a quantum problem worth solving.

Customized itself into a corner — and couldn't escape without Sabadell.

Mastercard and dunnhumby's GDPR privacy JV found no market beyond its own parents.

Tried to be everything for every service pro; ended up being nothing for anyone.

Changed its name to fix its future — the future didn't get the memo.

Sold digital transformation but couldn't transform itself.

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

Using Earth's magnetic field to navigate malls was ingenious — until malls emptied out.

Accounts receivable automation pioneer absorbed by Flywire after failing to scale past Series A.

D&B copied their ASX data edge in 18 months and offered it cheaper to all their clients.

Square cloned the market, and PayAnywhere became a cautionary tale in the mobile POS graveyard.

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

Australian shipping SaaS. Shopify Shipping arrived. Category commoditized.

AP automation pioneer sold for parts after failing to scale past mid-market limitations.

UK enterprise collaboration pioneer raised £36M and built a government-grade product—then lost the category to Microsoft Teams.

$100M spent evacuating 14,000 engineers — war invoiced what clients wouldn't.

India's Zapier got acqui-hired by Notion and promptly switched off.

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

Legacy SAP integrations at Coal India took 18 extra months — and killed the startup.

Demand forecasting disrupted by the most unpredictable demand event in modern history.

In-store digital engagement for Primark and ALDO couldn't outlast COVID's retail freeze.

Two decades of payroll processing expertise, made irrelevant by Gusto's modern UX in four years.

A decade-old recruiting network that got outbundled by better-resourced competitors.

Acqui-hired into oblivion by a domain registrar with different priorities.

Bridging citizens and officials, bridged by nobody.

No-code testing pioneer bootstrapped to acquisition while VC-funded rivals outspent and outbuilt it.

COVID gave ChainWatch its best pitch moment — but pilots never became paying customers.

NZ's proudest SaaS exit became a write-down when Lightspeed's stock crashed 75% in 2022.

The cloud accounting pioneer who invented the category, then wrote its users a Xero migration guide on the way out.

Egnyte spent $12M building a privacy ops division that generated under $2M before being shut down.

Government clouds evaporate when audit sunshine hits.

AI phone support for SMBs — crushed by better-funded clones in 24 months.

The a16z-backed AI networking platform that facilitated 5 million introductions and then quietly shut down with no product-market fit on revenue

Free lab management for 150,000 scientists couldn't survive a corporate acquirer's monetization demands.

A venue tech darling that kept the lights on for empty stadiums until it couldn't.

Built community for fitness studios — then COVID killed the studios.

VR for Wall Street analysts — who refused to wear the headset.

Luxury retail's favorite clienteling app got absorbed by Stripe and quietly disappeared.

The $176M AGI startup backed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — acquired by Amazon for the engineers, not the AI.

Mobile CI pioneer killed by its own Flutter-powered rebrand that outgrew the original product.

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

A modern vet practice OS that couldn't convince clinics to ditch their fax machines.

All-in-one remote hub that tried to out-Notion Notion on a pre-seed budget.

IFTTT burned its developer community chasing enterprise dollars it never actually captured.

Award-winning in 2019, unresponsive website by 2022. COVID turned a slow death into no death notice at all.

No-code chatbot builder survived eight years bootstrapped, then vaporized by a crowded market.

Scaled internationally before solving problems locally.

The $17B customer service platform that tried to buy SurveyMonkey for $4.1B, got blocked by shareholders, and ended up going private at a $6.8B discount to its peak

Enterprise restaurant kiosk SaaS with 87% uptime promising 99.9% — the math didn't work.

CEO falsified ARR, got ousted, and the engineers all left within 90 days.

Freemium analytics darling acquired by Snowflake only to be shelved within the year.

An underfunded ELN startup learned that in lab software, the best-funded team wins the deals.

Built the future of remote presence, then got folded into someone else's roadmap.

A pandemic-born virtual events darling that died the moment people could meet again.

A marketplace for transformation consultants that couldn't vet its own supply.

Pioneered email tracking for sales — then watched everyone else do it for free.

COVID made Qudini essential for every retailer; COVID's end made it optional for all of them.

The UK global mobile startup that raised $500M+ and served 500 markets — then its key investor was sanctioned by the UK government and the company went into administration

Women's coworking unicorn couldn't survive COVID and its own culture

Born from the COVID community wave, killed when the wave receded.

Ex-MI6 founders built a geopolitical risk tool that couldn't crack the enterprise sales cycle.

The enterprise social media management platform that IPO'd at $3.6B and watched two-thirds of its market cap disappear within 18 months

Built for pandemic weddings, killed by the return of real ones.

Git for designers — killed by the product it tried to complement

McKinsey tried to build startups for clients and discovered its incentives were fundamentally broken.

Civic data governance startup trapped between GDPR mandates and impossibly slow municipal procurement.

Faked ARR to raise Series A — KPMG found out during Series B.

Podcast analytics startup crushed between Apple, Spotify, and standardization.

Argentine chatbot SaaS. HubSpot and Intercom arrived in LatAm.

When your customers are cash-strapped biotech startups, your churn rate is directly correlated to their burn rate.

Germany's coal exit wiped out 40% of a predictive maintenance startup's market in months.

Powering the first iPhone's GPS was glorious — until Apple built its own and cut the cord.

Post-SPAC pressure forced AvePoint to kill its $20M data lineage division within months of going public.

Rewrote the product to chase bigger clients — and lost everything.

The AI scheduling assistant that came before LLMs — and watched AI scheduling become a free feature of every email client.

Argentina's leading dev agency. Accenture acquired it. Culture evaporated.

Guatemalan accounting startup killed when the government released its free version of the same product.

Ore grade software that couldn't grade its own retention metrics.

How is babby formed? And 16 years of human questions — all deleted in one day.

SoftBank's $1.5B bet on vertically integrating construction

High school sports management SaaS swept up in a distressed acquisition after budget freezes.

Shopify's native inventory update made Stitch Labs obsolete almost overnight.

Native ad pioneer swallowed by SSP consolidation after 13 years of independence.

Open data platforms don't survive when incumbents also open up.

Smarter cities, unsustainable margins.

Hockey AI analytics that couldn't outskate better-funded rivals in a pandemic-shortened season.

300,000 registered freelancers, 3% paid conversion, and one very quiet shutdown email.

NHS procurement cycles killed a promising GDPR metadata platform before revenue could begin.

Built a digital transformation map for clients who couldn't afford transformation.

The e-commerce personalization leader — acquired before the category it built went mainstream.

Open-source compliance for government: the market didn't want free.

Built for the event revolution, crushed by well-funded rivals when events went virtual.

Processed $12B in restaurant payments, then got processed out of existence by Lightspeed.

The NLP-powered customer experience analytics pioneer — absorbed by Qualtrics before AI made everyone an NLP company.

An AI vet triage tool that couldn't triage its own business model.

The UK's top quantum software firm surrendered independence because software alone can't survive without hardware.

Chilean last-mile SaaS. Acquired by project44. Team dispersed.

Siemens partnerships couldn't save this Ottawa MR startup from runway death.

A 'Sausage Factory' group chat brought down an $80M mobile ad platform.

A failed Coupa acquisition and a stubborn IP dispute sealed VendorGuard's fate.

French legaltech. Bar Association blocked the model.

Australian SMB workflow tool killed by a global wave of free-tier project management giants.

Built the enterprise people graph, then became a footnote in Slack's changelog.

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

A helpdesk pioneer that couldn't survive the Zendesk era it helped inspire.

Canada's premier AI unicorn — acquired by ServiceNow for talent, not for the AI products it promised.

AI data catalog pioneer swallowed by the very competitor it helped inspire.

Employee recognition SaaS. GDPR compliance cost more than the business was worth.

Capital One's DevOps dashboard open-source darling archived when internal sponsorship money dried up.

Selling data management to universities means fighting 18-month procurement cycles with a 12-month runway.

Buenos Aires events ticketing marketplace launched January 2020 — COVID lockdowns March 2020 closed all events, 100% ticket refunds burned $180K in one month from $400K reserves, closed 2021

Raised $146M to count shoppers in stores—COVID emptied every single one.

Getting acquired by HP for $31M was supposed to be the win — it was a slow death sentence.

Neat turned 300,000 loyal hardware fans into enemies the day it killed their scanners.

Built for citizens, killed by procurement.

Too complex for SMBs, too small for enterprise — the fatal no-man's land of integration tools.

The Barcelona election technology company raised €130M to digitize voting worldwide — then COVID-19 cancelled all elections globally in 2020 and the company filed bankruptcy.

Dutch Kubernetes canary release tool outgunned by LaunchDarkly's $200M funding machine.

Even $120 per dataset couldn't make open science data sharing financially sustainable at nonprofit scale.

Even $70M and elite backers couldn't let location data compete with Google's monopoly.

The behavioral analytics SaaS built by ex-Facebook engineers — acquired by Cloudflare for a fraction of what it raised

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

6,000 restaurant clients, zero revenue in April 2020. COVID finished what competition started.

Cambridge Analytica's fallout killed a $26M Facebook ad platform overnight.

Built loyalty for gyms on Mindbody's API — then Mindbody closed the door.

Blockchain couldn't save votes from its own vulnerabilities.

Built for Twitter's golden age, died when Instagram and TikTok took over.

COVID killed ShopKeep's 25,000 merchant clients before Lightspeed bought the wreckage for stock.

GE and Boeing used it. COVID killed it before enterprise adoption could.

Alphabet's smartest city turned into its most embarrassing exit.

Brazil's leading SME accounting SaaS. Acquired by Visma. Trajectory ended.

One lost petroleum contract took down Canada's go-to convenience store POS vendor.

Sold messaging to restaurants where staff refused to read the messages.

Franchise geo-advertising sounds lucrative until every franchise owner freezes their budget.

Sports agents protect their opacity—software that exposes deals doesn't get bought.

A decade of industrial AR disrupted by the platform players they helped educate.

On-demand private meeting rooms bookable by the hour raised $121M. COVID ended the need for temporary private spaces. Shut December 2020.

Twitter built the best mobile crash reporting tool — then sold it to Google who folded it into Firebase.

Eva the meeting bot built traction then got acquired into Webex obscurity.

Atlassian's team messenger — killed by Slack, twice

When your POS startup pivots to blockchain, that's usually the last pivot before lights-out.

Project management SaaS with Chilean roots. Slack and Asana won.

Thirty years of Latin American accounting dominance ended by a government e-invoicing mandate.

Relationship intelligence that couldn't survive the relationship with reality.

Beloved SQL analytics tool for data teams erased inside Sisense's acquisition machine.

Millions of researchers used the free version of open science metrics but almost none would pay for it.

YC-backed iPad POS couldn't survive the Square-Shopify price war.

Raised $74M to rule retail marketing, ended up a distressed acqui-hire for Seismic.

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

Enterprise no-code requires $10M+ to survive the 12-month sales cycle. $3M seed won't cut it.

Acquired to be cannibalized — HubSpot bought PieSync to kill it and bundle its features.

Policy-as-code for data governance arrived two years before the market was ready to buy it.

SMB app builder for restaurants and retailers made obsolete by Shopify and App Store policy changes.

GDPR wiped 22% of revenue in six months and a $60M publisher DMP was sold for scraps.

The $1B Hadoop unicorn that the cloud giants made obsolete before it could go public

Helping you find cereal in aisle 7 sounded useful until Walmart built it themselves.

The last great independent adtech platform — squeezed to death between Google and Facebook

When Google Sheets adds your startup's features for free, your runway disappears.

Marketing analytics darling swallowed whole by Salesforce's $800M acquisition machine.

Slack bought Screenhero for video calling, stripped it, and then partnered with Zoom anyway.

Google built the perfect email app — then killed it to save regular Gmail

Australian delivery SaaS. Announced fake contracts. ASIC charged founders.

Making public data beautiful, but not profitable.

Twenty years of AI pricing expertise, absorbed into SAP after Zalando gave it away for free.

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

Tried to be the operating system for salons, ended up being cut from the budget.

The YC e-commerce product data API — absorbed by Diffbot before reaching critical mass.

Swedish load testing veteran killed its own product to reboot as open-source k6 — and the bet paid off for Grafana.

GDPR killed a promising geofencing business that was finally finding its retail groove.

The designer's favorite tool, acquired then quietly smothered by Houzz.

Pioneering indoor location tech means nothing if the giants copy you for free.

SAP consulting. Overcommitted. Restructured.

A beloved construction blueprint app sold for $875M then quietly dismantled by Autodesk.

Built a clever ad format, then Google changed the rules.

An Oxford-born research tool proved that a prestigious pedigree cannot replace a network-effect moat.

Vienna's most loved CI/CD startup reached 50K developers then sold to escape GitHub's inevitable encroachment.

Built the perfect festival data tool, but the industry's gatekeepers had their own.

A $350M exit that quietly swallowed the product whole.

VC-backed BI darling couldn't escape Tableau's shadow despite $27M and A-list investors.

UK's second-largest contractor. £1.5B pension deficit. Zero cash.

Built restaurant loyalty software that got betrayed by an Oracle acquisition.

Digital democracy, deleted by a security flaw.

A $300M ad giant reduced to zero by Google and Facebook's duopoly stranglehold.

Mapped every deal relationship in the enterprise — except the one that would buy them out.

The API glue that couldn't stick in a market dominated by Zapier.

Hadoop-era data catalog built too late for on-prem and too slow to pivot to cloud.

Google Docs for science papers couldn't escape the gravity of academic publishing's old guard.

The app search engine that raised $167.5M from Alibaba to index the world's apps — then shut when Alibaba decided it didn't need them anymore

The New York Times paid $410M for one of the web's most-visited sites — then let Google's algorithm kill it.

Selling surveillance tools to track protesters wasn't a business model — it was a liability.

Real-time ad analytics pioneer quietly absorbed into Snap for a fraction of its promise.

Dutch container CI pioneer acquired by Oracle for a song, then slowly deprecated into nothingness.

Four years of piping data, then the tap ran dry on Series A funding.

A construction communication app swallowed by WeWork before it could outrun Procore.

Getting acquired by Apple is a win — unless it means your product disappears forever.

Ex-Amazon founder built the right DevOps tool at the wrong time against open-source giants.

Built a waitlist app for restaurants, then waited too long for a real moat.

Building a better scientific notebook than Jupyter meant nothing once Google, Microsoft and AWS backed the incumbent.

AI-powered wedding matching that was 42% wrong, 100% of the time.

The enterprise social network that won the market, sold to Microsoft — and got integrated too slowly to survive Slack.

API monitoring pioneer undersold by Postman's freemium wave and acquired below investor expectations.

The enterprise social network that IPO'd at $2B — sold for $462M after Slack changed everything

A/B testing pioneer sold for a fraction of its valuation after free tools ate the market

Uber for vets—where the $75 house call fee couldn't cover a vet's hourly rate.

Model deployment pioneer swallowed by Alteryx before cloud giants commoditized the entire category.

A global giant's Africa SME cloud product killed by infrastructure reality and corporate consolidation.

When the well-funded competitor wins the market, even the better product must close its doors.

Invented instant messaging, then got messaged into irrelevance.

Raised $55M to measure video ads, then Nielsen and comScore made them irrelevant.

The startup intelligence platform that knew everything about other companies failing — except how to stop its own slow bleed

Cleaned everyone's contact data — couldn't clean up its own competitive position.

An open-source distributed NoSQL database built for real-time web applications with live push updates.

Mapping shoppers' every move was a great idea retailers just refused to pay for.

Turning every window into a traffic sensor was brilliant until privacy lawyers got involved.

Built for developers, abandoned by its founders for a bigger paycheck at Palantir.

SMS for democracy, silenced by acquisition.

An online sales and marketing platform that helped salespeople predict and analyze sales using CRM data and online signals.

A no-code mobile app prototyping tool for creating interactive animations and designs on Android and iOS.

Machine learning for support tickets that got acquired before the model could ever really learn.

Good Technology raised $425M, was about to IPO, sold to BlackBerry. BlackBerry killed the product within a year.

An intelligent real-time CRM platform that enabled local businesses to target consumers using data-driven insights.

Microsoft built the living room PC experience before Apple TV and Netflix — then stopped developing it.

A data visualization platform that made political funding and legislative information transparent and accessible to citizens and institutions.

A smart workspace platform for businesses to manage projects and information.

Yahoo built the first visual web mashup tool in 2007. Beloved by developers. Killed in 2015 with zero explanation.

A sleek email app that made inboxes faster, lighter, and mobile-friendly with AI-powered sorting and smart gestures.

A mobile platform that enabled political campaigns to engage supporters through targeted SMS messaging.

An analytics tool for e-commerce sites that provided real-time customer behavior insights and customized messaging capabilities.

A scalable NoSQL database with ACID guarantees that required less hardware and ran faster than competitors.

OpTier was a cloud-based enterprise software platform that provided application performance management and business transaction monitoring for large-scale operations.

Berg was a cloud platform that powered Little Printer, an Internet-of-Things device that printed interesting content from the web and social media.

Human-curated search results — Google's Panda algorithm update killed it in one update.

The note-taking app that Evernote killed without even noticing

The $14 billion email marketing pioneer that acquired itself into irrelevance

Apple's mapping disaster became Locationary's exit — the acqui-hire you can't refuse.

The best search engine of the 1990s — until Google launched and made relevance the only metric that mattered.

A Facebook marketing platform that provided custom content recommendations and insights to help page owners optimize their posts for better engagement and sales.

The best photo app that ever existed shut down because it could not raise $500K. 55,000 users lost their photos. Co-founders published every financial document.

Sprint paid $36 billion to acquire Nextel and spent the next decade destroying the network they bought.

The graphic design unicorn almost died at seed stage. 100 investor rejections.

A publishing optimizer tool for Facebook content.

Millions edited their photos on Picnik — Google bought it for Picasa, then killed both.

Website monitoring service for developers.

Twitter changed its API rules and killed Tap11 overnight — the platform risk nobody hedged.

250 million downloads, $100M in settlements — the peer-to-peer network that the music industry destroyed.

Google built Evernote before Evernote — then abandoned it for Google Keep.

Website monitoring platform for developers.

Claimed to out-index Google on day one — returned meaningless results and died in two years.