New Enterprise Associates — portfolio autopsies

PARP inhibitor oncology company raised $700M and went bankrupt when FDA restricted its drug indications

CASB security pioneer raised $150M and was sold below its funding total as the market consolidated.

A co-founder of Google's ex-wife put your DNA in a database. Then she lost the company.

The luxury fashion e-commerce pioneer that invented the trunk show pre-order model raised 345M dollars and filed Chapter 11 in June 2024.

Drobo built a beloved RAID storage system for creatives and SMBs. Cloud storage made it obsolete. Bankrupt 2023.

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

Engineered bacteria as living medicines — a beautiful scientific idea that the clinic could not validate

Digital media's biggest SPAC at $1.5B. BuzzFeed News shut 18 months later. Stock down 95%.

The Stanford MOOC pioneer IPO'd at $4.3B in 2021 and fell 80% as lifetime learning economics proved unworkable

The AutoML unicorn that automated its own irrelevance

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

Pay-per-mile car insurance for people who barely drive. The drivers who signed up barely drove — and barely paid.

DTC mattress unicorn IPO'd at $575M in 2020 after raising $339M—then was taken private in 2022 at $6.90/share, down 79% from its IPO price, after years of losses proved the model unworkable.

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

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

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

Marc Lore built Diapers.com to $300M revenue. Amazon noticed, dropped diaper prices 30% to force a sale, acquired Quidsi for $545M in 2011, then shut every property in 2017 once the threat was neutralized.

Members-only flash sales pioneer raised $236M and hit $1B valuation. Trained customers to never pay full price. Luxury brands pulled merchandise. Sold to Hudson's Bay for $250M — a 75% haircut.

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

Real-time friend radar was creepy enough that users deleted it within days.

Henrik Fisker's original EV company — raised $1.17B, built the Karma sports car, then lost its battery supplier, had 320 cars destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, and collapsed

The location-sharing app that arrived before smartphones were ready for it.

The creator of Crackdown launched APB — a $100M online shooter with subscription pricing — and went into administration 79 days after launch.