In June 2020, forty-year-old Austin startup ScaleFactor told its remaining staff the company was suspending most of its operations. Founder Kurt Rathmann blamed Covid-19 for gutting demand. The real story, reported by Forbes weeks later, was less forgivable: the ScaleFactor…
In April 2019, Anki a robotics company that had sold 1.5 million AI-powered toy robots and pulled in close to $100 million in revenue in a single year laid off its entire staff of roughly 200 people with a week’s…
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…
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 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…
