A $699 kitchen appliance that needed a Wi-Fi connection to squeeze a bag of pre-cut vegetables. That was the promise of Juicero, and for about four years it was one of Silicon Valley’s favorite stories. Then, in one 2017 video,…
At 1:30 AM on August 10, 2015, the inboxes of 400 employees simultaneously lit up with a catastrophic message. While most of the workforce slept, an email arrived from CEO Maren Kate Donovan announcing that the startup was ceasing all…
Discovered Materials Funding Round: $9M Seed Bets AI Can Cool Down AI The Discovered Materials funding round just closed at $9 million and the pitch is almost too on-the-nose: AI made your chips run dangerously hot, so now AI agents…
Why Homejoy failed comes down to one broken week in July 2015 but the real story starts two years earlier. Homejoy, a San Francisco cleaning startup that had raised nearly $40 million and booked cleanings in 35 cities across four…
In June 2024, a Munich sensor company that had spent seven years building toward the self-driving car boom filed for insolvency and most retrospectives of that year’s startup casualties stopped the story right there. The Blickfeld LiDAR startup insolvency happened…
In the summer of 2015, a Luxe valet in a blue windbreaker could be standing on a San Francisco curb, key fob in hand, ready to run your car to a garage three blocks away — all summoned from an…
In March 2011, a photo-sharing app nobody had used yet announced it had more money than Google got from the same investor at the same stage. The Color app startup failure happened because Color Labs raised $41 million in venture…
In January 2013, three founders in New York launched an app that Twitter had already agreed to buy four months earlier before it had a single user. Three years later, that same app had over 200 million people watching six-second…
In November 2015, a small Welsh drone company quietly filed for insolvency, and with it went the largest crowdfunding failure Europe had ever seen. The Zano drone Kickstarter failure happened because a small Welsh engineering firm called Torquing Group promised…
