Startup Failures in 2021

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

DiDi's food delivery arm entered Brazil, spent two years subsidizing orders, and quietly exited — defeated by iFood

The photonic chip leader that sued Cisco into buying it after Cisco tried to walk away mid-deal.

Recruiter analytics startup loved by mid-market users but blocked by enterprise ATS integration barriers.

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

Impact agri-fintech that couldn't hedge against Mexico's 2020 southern drought.

FDA-approved peanut allergy drug couldn't find enough patients to survive.

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

Biotech stock fell 80% in a single day after Phase 3 failure — the Eosinophilic Gastritis gamble that didn't pay

Chilean e-learning platform. Coursera and edX went free. Aprendanet couldn't survive.

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

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

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

Ford's 'AWS of urban mobility' absorbed into its parent and killed by internal restructuring.

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

Avinew bet on self-driving cars arriving faster than they actually did.

The anonymous algorithmic stablecoin that crashed to $0.04 in 60 days.

Greek ridesharing app Beat entered Latin America in 2016 and became the leading challenger to Uber in Chile, Colombia, and Peru — acquired by BMW/Daimler's Free Now in 2019 and shut down LatAm operations in January 2021.

Mexico's electric scooter unicorn hopeful. It ran out of money before running out of sidewalks.

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

Mobile money API pioneer acqui-hired away as telecoms commoditized its core infrastructure.

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

Pioneered the beauty subscription box at $485M. Sephora copied it. Sold for $1 to Walgreens in 2021.

Spanish neobank's Chilean expansion. Parent ran out of money first.

Thousands of tour operators trusted Bookeo — until the platform abandoned them mid-crisis.

The social podcast app that became Twitter Spaces before Twitter Spaces existed.

The luxury EV startup backed by FAW and Tencent that halted production in July 2020 and declared bankruptcy without delivering a single car.

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

a16z-backed public safety drone platform sold in distress to Motorola.

Riding the rideshare wave for elder medical transport couldn't survive the pandemic's travel freeze.

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

Mexican live tutoring platform. Duolingo and Preply arrived.

Argentine chatbot SaaS. HubSpot and Intercom arrived in LatAm.

ePRO platform outgunned by enterprise giants offering the same feature for free with bigger contracts.

A clinic management tool that needed more management than the clinics it served.

A Medicare Advantage InsurTech that went public via Chamath's SPAC — only for a short-seller report to reveal the DoJ had been investigating the company for months and the SPAC filing never disclosed it.

The audio-only social app that made everyone feel like they'd found the future — before Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, and Facebook Live Audio copied the format and made the original irrelevant.

GDPR compliance startup with 180 clients but too cheap to survive its own burn rate.

Brazil's medical booking app outmaneuvered by global incumbents with deeper pockets.

Chile's grocery delivery pioneer, absorbed by Uber and stripped of independence.

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

Sears' bankruptcy and Amazon's logistics arm crushed the micro-fulfillment pioneer.

Carbon nanotubes that work in the lab, but cost 50x too much to sell at scale.

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

242 years. Amazon took the last decade. COVID finished it.

Mexico deep tech: CONACYT's co-ownership IP requirement blocked US/EU VC investment, no university tech transfer capacity, and ChatGPT increased pressure to differentiate from software AI

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

Decentralized democracy: a protocol nobody voted to fund.

China's Uber. $73B IPO. Chinese regulators destroyed it in 48 hours.

UK savings app offering 5% interest on bonds raised £33M. Could not reach profitability. Shut October 2021 with 30,000 customers.

Romania's fragmented healthcare bureaucracy killed a promising telehealth startup.

Zimbabwe's largest fintech accused of fueling black market dollars; regulators nearly destroyed it.

Enterprise energy compliance SaaS squeezed out by Schneider and Siemens behemoths.

Ghana's fintech cleanup and COVID panic drained Enrich Africa of users and liquidity simultaneously.

Built a $50M+ esports arena in Las Vegas and sold it for $6.65M.

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

One fraudulent corporate client and €800K in bad debt ended Italy's invoice financing pioneer.

Promising warehouse robot maker absorbed into enterprise giant at below-unicorn price.

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

Korea's bank-backed neobank crushed between two ecosystem giants.

Sensors under salmon cages drowned in unit economics.

China's freight unicorn grounded by cybersecurity regulators the same week as its IPO.

One spoofed Aave contract address wiped out $15M and ended a DeFi dream.

Hyperinflation and a parent company's $100M debt spiral killed Zimbabwe's digital lender.

US employer-focused mental health platform raised $220M at a $1.1B valuation—then merged with Headspace at a significant writedown as clinical staffing costs proved impossible to scale profitably.

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

The expert physician navigation platform merged with Doctor On Demand at distressed valuations after raising $300M

Supply-chain finance. Built on insurance that did not exist.

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

Brazil's personal finance app with 6M users, sold for scraps to PicPay after Nubank made it irrelevant.

Laid off everyone in 2019, rebuilt alone, then couldn't raise the $20M it needed to win.

Three corporate giants tried to fix US healthcare and ran into each other

The wellness-first life insurance platform that raised $80M by targeting athletes and health-conscious consumers, then sold at a steep discount.

Life insurance designed for health-conscious people — runners, cyclists, and vegans — who were underpriced by traditional actuarial tables. COVID-19 made the health-based risk model unstable.

A technology-first home insurance startup that went public via SPAC at $5B — and lost 99% of its market value as catastrophic weather and elevated loss ratios destroyed the thesis.

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

Group video chat with $72M raised. Epic Games acquired it for Fortnite social features. Built nothing useful. Shut in 2021.

AI diagnostics for hospitals that couldn't afford diagnostics, or AI.

Outmatched by LinkedIn's diversity filters before reaching Series A.

90 million readers, a $600M exit — and the Canadian dream quietly absorbed into Seoul.

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

Smart apartments for landlords, killed by a pandemic that emptied the buildings.

The first large-scale DeFi bank run — a $2B partial-reserve stablecoin drained to zero in under 24 hours, with Mark Cuban among the casualties.

Brazilian convenience delivery app acquired by Burger King Brazil for $7M in 2020 — and shut down in 2021 when the parent company refocused on its core restaurant business.

Japan's first mobile bank absorbed before it could change Japanese banking.

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

Brazilian crowdshipping startup that built a last-mile network of neighbourhood pickup points — could not make the unit economics close at the density required to sustain operations.

Banned from accepting new users three weeks after its own NASDAQ IPO.

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

SoftBank's $1.5B bet on vertically integrating construction

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

Pivoting from marketing analytics to HR optimization left the company with no core audience and a frozen market.

The WeWork competitor that raised $400M to lock up flexible office space in every major city — then COVID emptied every office on Earth simultaneously

Latvia's AI recruitment startup found that Baltic SMEs weren't ready to pay for workforce analytics.

The Chinese streaming giant that became an EV and smartphone conglomerate, collapsed under $6B of debt, and whose founder fled to the US.

Deep learning met legal docs but couldn't find anyone willing to pay the invoice.

French legaltech. Bar Association blocked the model.

COVID wiped out Lendr's SME borrowers before regulators could finish them off.

Leverj raised $4M via ICO to build decentralized derivatives but couldn't compete with BitMEX's UX and liquidity.

Employee wellbeing SaaS. Acquired by Roper Technologies. Absorbed.

Mexican streaming infrastructure. AWS CloudFront arrived.

Lima's traffic chaos and Rappi's cash burned Listo! to the ground silently.

A sports audio room that Spotify bought, renamed, and deleted in under two years.

Argentine consumer neobank targeting millennials — wound down in 2021 when the team pivoted to build Pomelo, a B2B fintech infrastructure company, acknowledging that the consumer product had not found viable product-market fit in Argentina's volatile economy.

Colombia's fashion ecommerce dream dismantled by geography and giants.

Nine years serving the underbanked, then Chime's venture subsidies made the business model impossible.

Mexican telemedicine platform with 200K users that couldn't charge anyone anything.

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

Novel diabetes mechanism, modest Phase 2a results, and a decisive Phase 2b failure ended Melior's 14-year quest.

The smart mirror startup that couldn't reflect its way past COVID.

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

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

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

KBZ's digital payments arm died when Myanmar's banking sector froze after the coup.

When Wagestream owns every employer relationship, there's no room for a second player.

Europe's most valuable neobank quietly closed its US operation — regulatory roadblocks and $9B valuations don't mix well

Nemo Savings had one banking partner — and one merger killed the entire startup.

Twenty-five years of neural stem cell hope ended in Chapter 7 with $2M left in the bank.

Brazil's P2P SMB lender undone by pandemic defaults and regulatory headwinds

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

Thailand's billion-dollar crypto dream evaporated with the 2018 crypto winter.

Nigeria's digital lender Carbon shut its Kenya expansion as COVID defaults piled up.

The auto repair marketplace that couldn't solve the trust problem inherent to car repair.

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

Canada's DERMS champion couldn't scale fast enough to survive its own investors.

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

A technology-forward individual health insurance plan backed by Google and Peter Thiel — that lost over $1 billion in its first two years as a public company.

Digital media startup fabricated metrics — CEO impersonated YouTube's CEO

Nigeria's Paga couldn't replicate its model in Angola — currency, regulation, and incumbents blocked every move.

Brazil's best payments infrastructure startup, swallowed by Stone and stripped of its startup DNA.

Free vet advice for 80% of users who never opened their wallets.

A payments compliance layer with FCA approval but only 12 paying clients before the money ran out.

Canada's BNPL pioneer absorbed by the very wave it helped create.

Turkey's payments consolidation after the iyzico mega-deal left no room for Paytrek.

Costa Rica's mobile payment hopeful died waiting for a license that never came in time.

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

Twitter paid $86M for live video in 2015 — then deleted 6 years of broadcasts to save server costs

Indian checkout SaaS. Amazon acquired it. Project shelved.

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

Personalized medication packaging for seniors: clinically brilliant, economically catastrophic.

A connected boxing bag that punched above its unit economics and knocked itself out.

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

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

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

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

A lifestyle media empire's subscription box got lost in a corporate merger shuffle.

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

The on-demand delivery pioneer swallowed by the capital war it helped start.

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

The B2B legal marketplace connecting corporate teams to vetted outside counsel raised $9M before quietly winding down in 2021.

Seventeen years protecting kids' privacy online — still couldn't build a business.

Argentina's real estate classifieds platform swallowed by a Uruguayan competitor after never cracking profitability

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

A century-old bank reinvented itself as a neobank, then got swallowed by a fintech.

The continuous performance management SaaS that raised $81M — acquired for far less by Beqom and shut down as Lattice, Culture Amp, and Workday bundled the category

AI SOC automation startup absorbed by FireEye before it could prove standalone value.

Two fatal crashes in 24 hours ended Revel's moped business in New York City forever.

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

Crowdsourced delivery startup swallowed whole by the incumbent it was meant to disrupt.

$40B fintech. Restricted GameStop trading. Congressional hearings. Stock never recovered.

The legal AI pioneer sued out of existence by its data supplier

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

GoodRx's $12.7B IPO made corporate pharmacy discount clones instantly obsolete.

Dominican telemedicine startup served wealthy insured patients while missing 4 million uninsured below.

Ad-free news for everyone — until Twitter bought it and killed it.

Canada's national digital ID champion that couldn't make citizens care.

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

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

Argentina's equity crowdfunding platform quietly shut down as economic chaos and capital controls made crowd investing impossible

France's cloud gaming pioneer burned €100M proving GPU streaming is brutally expensive.

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

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

The original neo-bank — killed not by the market but by the acquirer.

The original US neobank that proved the model worked — bought by BBVA for $117M and shut down 7 years later as collateral damage in BBVA's US exit

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

Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher couldn't make bodysurfing a billion-dollar market.

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

Smarter cities, unsustainable margins.

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

Flexible solar that flexed brilliantly in the lab, but snapped in the market.

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

350,000 loyal Danish users couldn't save a free PFM app from acqui-hire oblivion.

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

The unofficial Netflix Squid Game crypto went from $0.01 to $2,861 in days then the developers pulled $3.4M and vanished

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

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

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

A $7B NYSE-listed tutoring empire lost 70% of its value in a single trading day.

Client-side security specialist that couldn't scale sales before Akamai decided to buy rather than beat it.

Blockchain P2P insurance with 40 members per pool was math that never worked.

German labor law codetermination requirements made every customer deployment a 6-month legal negotiation.

Thodex's CEO fled Turkey with up to $13B in user funds, earning a 11,196-year prison sentence.

Cloud security OG with 400 customers sold to F5 for $68M then quietly killed in 18 months.

Chilean packaging and e-commerce supplies. Amazon Business arrived.

Bought for $3.2B but its core mission — curing cystic fibrosis — was quietly killed.

Photo authentication tech ahead of its time — killed by commoditization and enterprise indifference.

Online grocery for Colombian suburbs. Couldn't raise beyond Seed.

Uber's self-driving dream became a $2.5B nightmare after its car killed a pedestrian.

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

India's $300M furniture unicorn-hopeful sold to Reliance for pennies after $100M in venture funding

LATAM's mobility super-app was destroyed by COVID before it could reach critical mass.

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

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

Canadian office supply marketplace crushed by Amazon Business expansion.

Beijing's double-reduction policy killed a $3B edtech empire overnight.

Walmart tried the luxury personal shopper model twice, failed twice — first Jetblack, then Code Eight.

Charting too many courses sank the original mission.

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

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

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

Financial services agent network in rural Mexico. CoDi arrived and changed everything.

The anti-obesity biotech that discovered a novel MetAP2 enzyme pathway, advanced to Phase 3, and dissolved after two fatal clinical safety events.

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

35 VR venues worldwide, zero revenue for 12 months — COVID made the math impossible.

Ethiopia's fintech opportunity looked open — then the central bank slammed the door shut.

Cambodia's central bank built Bakong and made ZigPay's QR dreams irrelevant.

The algorithm that was supposed to price homes perfectly lost $880M and 25% of the company's jobs

The Colombian lending fintech that couldn't survive Mexico's COVID credit crunch.

Government drone contract killed by election cycle and exclusivity disputes.

16 years of peer-to-peer lending, ended by the rules it helped create

China's original short-video king had 300M users — then Douyin arrived and erased it.