How businesses began, found their footing and faced what came next.
The full archive, in the appUsed-car seller Shift bought Fair Technologies' dealer-marketplace assets for $15M cash and 2.5% of its stock, with SoftBank lending $20M for it.
Read the caseAt $50M with 12,000+ active outlets, the B2B pharmacy marketplace raised $4.5M to turn suppliers into dark stores in a managed marketplace.
Read the caseRidepanda launched in 2020 as a D2C e-bike marketplace, then rebranded as a corporate benefit provider after thin margins and service burdens; it raised $7.5M.
Read the caseRevenueCat's first acquisition was a ~$6M-ARR subscription app with 93,847 payers, kept running as a live demo for its tools.
Read the caseSix years after opening a Dutch office, Rad said it would stop selling in the UK and EU from 2024 and lay off about 40, after four layoff rounds since 2021.
Read the caseFrench business bank Qonto, with 450,000 customers and large cash reserves, bought Regate in March 2024, its second acquisition, to reach accountants.
Read the caseQogita, founded by a father and son, raised €80M led by Dawn Capital to take its one-cart wholesale marketplace beyond beauty, under an outside CEO.
Read the caseThe Bremen B2B marketplace spent a profitable decade replacing fax-catalogue supply buying, then raised its first real round to expand beyond Europe.
Read the case'We're 0-1 builders, not at-scale operators': the $2B fintech's co-CEOs and CTO gave up their roles with $7B of ARR connected and no layoffs, no cash crunch.
Read the caseThe $9B AI search company absorbed the Seattle team that connects LLMs to Google Drive, SharePoint and other external data sources.
Read the casePaytm told Canadian users its bill-payments app would close on March 14, 2022, calling it a small experiment too immaterial to keep as it focused on India.
Read the caseSeven-month-old Passes acquired a16z-backed creator platform Fanhouse in July 2023 and offered a 95% take rate; Fanhouse co-founder Rosie Nguyen resigned.
Read the caseParcha builds custom LLM agents for KYB, fraud and onboarding, and closed a $5M seed with no revenue two months after launch; Brex and Bridge are customers.
Read the caseWith 39.6M subscribers and a 100M target for 2024, Paramount bet on partner launches in three markets as Q1 profit fell.
Read the casePanera CEO Paul Carbone undid a 2024 cost cut that added iceberg to salads and launched RISE to win back traffic; visits fell every month of early 2026.
Read the casePanera tested Miso's CookRight Coffee in two cafes, framing it as quality for subscribers rather than labor savings.
Read the caseAfter six years of fronting vendors while universities paid in 15-30 days, Parmley pivoted the startup into an instant cross-border payments network.
Read the caseAfter two layoffs and a reported Tiger Global pullback from its $100M fund, On Deck spun off careers and shrank its accelerator terms.
Read the caseIn an Inc42 interview, OfBusiness's Nitin Jain says a ChatGPT-style layer wasn't enough, so it fine-tuned Llama on tender data.
Read the caseMono, a Y Combinator fintech, offers Colombian startups business accounts opened in 15 minutes, backed by a $6M Tiger Global-led seed.
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