How businesses began, found their footing and faced what came next.
The full archive, in the appThe Seattle anonymization startup had happy customers processing billions of records, but product-market fit never clicked; pitch the data, not the compliance.
Read the caseFounded in 2022, it raised $1.2M for a full-stack digital gold savings app, then wound down in July 2025 after its Series A commitments collapsed.
Read the caseDays after its Gravity SUV launch, Lucid swapped CEOs for the first time in six years — and analysts immediately asked why no permanent successor was announced.
Read the caseThe Israel-based foodtech took its product's name and closed a $30M Series C co-led by dsm-firmenich Venturing and Sienna Venture Capital, with Ferrero joining.
Read the caseThe last major US-assembled smartphone: a Fort Worth plant with ~3,800 workers and Moto Maker customization that collapsed within a year when sales never came.
Read the caseSix months post-launch, GoodOnes became Ollie — aligning the brand with the AI octopus users already loved, while keeping every photo on the device.
Read the caseBorn at JPL as a probe that would eat its own aluminum parts, Found Energy raised a $12M seed to crack scrap aluminum into carbon-negative industrial heat.
Read the caseWith rates rising and buyers frozen out, the all-cash-offer startup acquired the host-to-own platform whose Airbnb roommates fund a 3-5% down payment.
Read the caseThe YC-backed bootcamp laid off 30 to 45 people, then rebuilt itself as Elevate, a B2B SaaS platform where sales teams keep their best practices alive.
Read the caseFounded by two Setu alumni, DPDzero routes delinquent borrowers to AI voice agents or ethics-trained human advisors — and gets paid only on recovery.
Read the caseThe risk-assessment startup — founded 2017, $1M seed, a product that maps the riskiest vulnerabilities — embedded into AttackIQ's exposure validation suite.
Read the caseEx-Facebook and FanDuel operators built a platform matching companies to cybersecurity vendors, charging both sides instead of letting marketing budgets decide.
Read the caseCanva acquired the Australian generative-image startup — 19M users, 1B+ images, a fresh in-house model — to speed its AI roadmap against Adobe and Midjourney.
Read the caseBorn from a meal-kit startup, Yummy's AI rewrites recipes around preferences — 'no rice', 'less carbs', 'more Polish' — and generates the dish photos too.
Read the caseA SmartNews marketing VP and a Scenario founder bet Stable Diffusion and DALL-E can cut game art costs and finally let their families be the heroes.
Read the caseA proprietary model trained on tens of millions of medical documents automates referral paperwork — IVP led at a $605M valuation.
Read the caseArnout Schuijff missed coding, started over with bars and restaurants, and eight months after a €20M Series A closed €30M from Alphabet's fund.
Read the caseMozilla's second-ever acquisition was a talent deal: the Slack status-updater team that ran out of funding joins Firefox's ML push.
Read the caseBacked by NextEra's $32.8M round, the heat-to-electricity startup shelved its original tech for modular reactors that make hydrogen and carbon black.
Read the caseAs mortgage rates cooled housing, the brokerage killed its Seattle title-and-escrow automaker and laid off 10% of its own workforce.
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