Better.com bet Amazon employees would pledge startup equity for mortgage down payments
Better.com launched Equity Unlocker with Amazon: employees pledge vested shares, not cash, for down payments — at rates up to 2.5 points higher
Read the casestartups.centerA CASESTUDIES.CHAT ARCHIVE
Every company
starts somewhere.
How businesses began, found their footing and faced what came next.
The full archive, in the appPublished cases
2,000 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDBetter bought Trussle for its first overseas bet, months before its SPAC
Better, riding a $25B refinancing year and a $7.7B SPAC merger, paid roughly $9M for UK broker Trussle to take its digital mortgage model overseas.
Read the caseZepto walked away from Flipkart's under-$2Bn majority buyout to stay IPO-bound
Flipkart's offer valued Zepto below $2Bn and demanded a majority stake; the founders refused, and Zepto turned to General Atlantic and ADIA at $2.5-3Bn instead.
Read the caseUstraa sold to VLCC at a 40% valuation cut after FY23 losses hit Rs 40 crore
The men's grooming D2C brand grew revenue 47% to Rs 97 crore in FY23 but spent Rs 1.42 per revenue rupee — and exited to Carlyle-owned VLCC in July 2023.
Read the caseTier Mobility pivoted from 'all-out growth' to 'profitability first', cutting 7%
A year after a $200M Series D and four acquisitions, the micromobility leader shut side projects and unprofitable cities to stop the bleed.
Read the caseTable Space hired bankers for an IPO targeting $2.5B, up from a $550M mark
The Indian managed-workspace firm serving Apple and Google runs 60+ centers and 9.5M sq ft — and wants to nearly double it before listing.
Read the caseRo bet on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in 2021 — its fastest-growing line by 2024 (interview)
CEO Zachariah Reitano says Ro moved significant resources into GLP-1s in 2021, launched in 2023, and is in no rush to go public.
Read the caseRapidAPI cut half its staff as a week-old CEO refocused a $1B API marketplace
Six months after touting 4M developers and 40,000 APIs, Rapid cut about 115 people — 50% — betting discipline beats competing on every front.
Read the casePlume laid off a sixth of staff to speed a fee-for-service pivot, a year after Series B
Trans telehealth startup Plume cut more than two dozen jobs in October 2023 to accelerate a fee-for-service build-out, a year after a $24M Series B.
Read the caseByteDance's Pico halted its VR expansion, laying off hundreds to refocus on hardware
ByteDance's VR unit Pico restructured in November 2023, letting go a few hundred staff and refocusing on hardware and core technologies after sluggish sales
Read the caseOrange QS raised €1.5M betting qubit testing is quantum's scaling bottleneck
A TNO spinout sells room-temperature, automated test equipment for quantum chips, pitching 'lab to fab' for the quantum supply chain.
Read the caseMiso's $50M fry robot Flippy went to work in a Jack in the Box kitchen
Years of development landed in one California restaurant at $3,500 a month, betting kitchen robots answer fast food's labor gap.
Read the caseMenhood, a men's grooming D2C, opened a ~INR 19.5 Cr IPO on NSE Emerge
Jaipur's Macobs Technologies took its 2019-vintage men's grooming brand public on India's SME board amid a record SME IPO surge.
Read the caseAfter $88M raised, Melorra weighed a sale at a tenth of its $120M valuation
The online jeweller that raised $88M saw surging losses, a one-tenth-valuation bridge and unpaid-salary reports end in INR 40-50 Cr sale talks.
Read the caseLollipop AI launched a recipe-first grocery marketplace with Sainsbury's alongside
A Monzo-era UK entrepreneur built a marketplace that turns recipes into shopping baskets, betting meal planning is grocery's missing front door.
Read the caseHypernative raised $9M to predict web3 attacks before they happen
Two ex-IBM, Google and Microsoft engineers emerged from stealth with Pre-Cog, betting crypto needs threat detection before the hack, not after.
Read the caseHook raised $3M to let fans remix licensed tracks for TikTok legally
A former JioSaavn COO is building an AI remix app that pays rights holders, betting attribution can turn derivative music into a market.
Read the caseHeads Up For Tails took its first VC round at 14, scaled stores — losses tripled
The pet-care retailer raised $37M from Verlinvest and Sequoia in 2021, grew FY22 revenue 85.9% to Rs 125.5 crore — but losses shot up 3.3X.
Read the caseGreenLite bet owning the whole permitting pipeline could cut waits from months to weeks
Austin proptech GreenLite emerged from stealth with $8M to own construction permitting end to end for chains like Chick-fil-A, Domino's and Chipotle
Read the caseEve came out of stealth with $14M to put pre-trained legal LLMs in law firms' hands
Three Rubrik veterans launched an AI platform for document review, case analysis, intake and research, already serving a dozen-plus firms.
Read the case