Startup Failures in 2018

Carnegie Mellon's adaptive learning spinout burned through cash waiting for 18-month procurement cycles.

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

A $118M drone empire that collapsed overnight with zero severance.

Ask.fm had 150M users and a direct line to a teen suicide epidemic. IAC paid $150M. Never fixed the safety problem.

18 years, countless EU regulations, zero commercial scale — a German identity cautionary tale.

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

Argentina's Amazon-challenger backed by Bertelsmann lost an unwinnable war against Mercado Libre

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

Casey Neistat built the anti-Instagram. CNN paid $25M for it. They built a deals website.

The original crypto Ponzi scheme that promised 1% daily returns — and made the phrase "Hey hey hey" famous before collapsing with $2.6 billion in investor losses.

Italy's BitGrail lost 17M NANO tokens and its founder was later convicted of concealing the theft.

$112M discovered that luxury asset lending is just pawnbroking with a VC deck.

Cliffy B raised $16M for his comeback studio. LawBreakers flopped on launch. Radical Heights died in beta. Studio gone in 4 years.

Spain's self-publishing platform. Amazon KDP launched in Spanish and ended it.

The ex-Blizzard studio that built WildStar to challenge World of Warcraft — shut down by NCSoft when subscriber numbers never recovered from the launch window

Hospital video monitoring for seniors: 18-month sales cycles and a $15M loan default killed it

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

San José electric bike sharing raised $400K — COVID eliminated downtown office workers, MOPT regulated e-bike speed to 25km/h with special registration, bike theft in peripheral zones, monthly subscription model collapsed

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

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

$534 million vanished overnight because basic crypto security was ignored.

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

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

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

Digital media company with 1 billion monthly views shut without warning on a Friday. 300 employees found out Monday morning. YouTube had changed its algorithm.

Demand response's biggest name got blindsided by the regulation it helped create.

Texas's beloved local delivery app — absorbed by a grocery chain as national giants arrived.

Verizon spent $1.2 billion building a streaming service 2.5 million people used.

GoPro's drone — recalled for falling out of the sky after battery failures, re-launched to compete with DJI, discontinued again, and killed $8B in shareholder value along the way

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

Amex bought InAuth to bury it, not to build it — a classic acqui-kill.

Mexico's Shopify. Shopify arrived. Kichink didn't survive.

Nigeria's second-largest e-commerce unicorn sold for a reported $10M after $73M raised — Africa's biggest startup write-off

A $700 home robot that smiled and filmed your family — cancelled two weeks before shipping.

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

Lena Dunham's feminist media brand that 500K subscribers couldn't save.

A smart sprinkler startup killed by better-funded competitors and hardware margin compression.

Millions of brides were inspired; none of them paid enough for Lover.ly to survive.

Mozambique's first crypto remittance startup died when its banks got a call from the central bank.

The millennial news brand that went all-in on Facebook video — the day before Facebook changed the algorithm

TransferWise and Revolut launched and made this startup's entire premise obsolete overnight.

Built a mobile streaming platform that Apple and Google made redundant with a software update.

A social media platform where users created and shared short lip-sync music videos.

An aftermarket heads-up display device that projected GPS navigation onto a car's windshield to make driving safer.

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

Brazil's challenger bank was killed by its own banking partner's capital failure.

Universal QR loyalty layer for grocers got steamrolled by Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Built the rails for P2P lending — then the trains stopped running.

Epic spent $150M+ building a MOBA, then Fortnite existed and nothing else mattered.

Parking app swallowed by its own merger after Google entered the space.

The corporate learning platform that got absorbed before it could prove its model.

Thailand's OG digital wallet died when PromptPay made it redundant after 11 years.

Built a $99 dedicated email device at the exact moment iPhone and Android launched — the smartphone revolution eliminated the need for dedicated email hardware within 2 years

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

Amateur GPS tracking hit a professional wall when the big players moved downstream.

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

Yahoo paid $200M for fashion collage social with 20M users — Verizon acquired Yahoo, Instagram and Pinterest built shopping features, and Verizon shut Polyvore in 2018

The legal analytics startup mapping every US judge's decision patterns was acquired by LexisNexis in 2017 and absorbed into an enterprise suite.

The cobot pioneer whose friendly robot face couldn't mask insufficient manufacturing precision.

Technically superior Splunk challenger raised $30M only to sell distressed assets back to the competitor it feared.

Won DARPA's hardest robot challenge — Google bought them, then killed them anyway.

The on-demand shipping service that forgot shipping companies exist — and subsidized every box.

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

Shopping inside Instagram. Instagram built it themselves.

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

$60M parking sensor pioneer sold for pennies after hardware costs gutted its margins.

The original content discovery app — killed by eBay's acquisition and then its own founders' buyback

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

Talent data aggregator absorbed by Salesforce as LinkedIn's data walls made independence impossible.

A £29M anchor investor pulling out sank the whole personal finance vision.

Facebook paid $100M for an app, got 5 months of use, then shut it down

The studio that reinvented narrative gaming then abruptly laid off 250 staff in a single day

Bioprinting breast tissue for cancer survivors — a noble mission that ran out of runway.

Blood testing. Miniaturized. Fictional.

The $9B blood-testing unicorn built entirely on fabricated science — and the conviction of its founder

Lachlan Murdoch-backed ad startup sued Google for USD 300M and ran out of money mid-lawsuit.

Digital democracy, deleted by a security flaw.

Riding the 3D printing hype to a $750M valuation — then crashing back to Earth.

MENA's second Amazon burned $67M trying to beat the first Amazon.

The Middle East's electronics marketplace that couldn't survive the Amazon shadow.

SAP consulting. Overcommitted. Restructured.

Errol Damelin built a £1B payday lender on 5,853% APR loans. FCA capped rates in 2015. Wonga wrote off £220M in unaffordable loans. Filed administration August 2018 after compensation claim surge.

Germany's social gaming giant. Facebook platform changes ended it.

Built a prettier job board for hourly workers and forgot to build a business model.

The Latin American edtech that raised $36M for educational games — and fabricated six million active users to get there

A 2-hour Rx delivery startup discovered pharmacy regulation moves much slower than venture capital.