Failed AI Startups
390 venture-backed ai startups have shut down after raising $30.4B combined — about 17% of the entire graveyard. The biggest cohort last raised in 2022, and the most common final round was Seed.
AI is simultaneously the hottest funding category on the planet and one of the largest sections of the graveyard. A gold rush does not lower the failure rate — it just multiplies the number of companies exposed to it, and being in a hot sector is not a moat.
The Damage, by the Numbers
$5.0M
Median raised before shutdown
$77.9M
Average raised — the big flameouts drag it up
27
Died holding $100M+ in funding
3
Raised $1B+ and still closed
Class of the crash
Closed ai startups by year of their final funding round
80
127
105
61
16
2021
$6.2B
2022
$2.6B
2023
$3.8B
2024
$17.5B
2025
$217.3M
How far they got
Last round raised before shutting down
Pre-Seed
61
Seed
124
Series A
55
Series B
24
Series C+
16
Post-IPO
4
Debt & Notes
23
Other
83
Based on the last five years of fundraising data tracked in the VCbacked database.
The Graveyard
Showing 100 of 390 closed startups
Company | Raised | Last Round | What They Did | Location | Founders | Site | Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cruise | $16.0B | Corporate | Cruise is an autonomous vehicle company that develops electric cars for urban mobility. | San Francisco, California, United States | Daniel Kan | Reveal | |
Argo AI | $3.6B | Corporate | Argo AI builds software, hardware, maps, and cloud-support infrastructure for self-driving vehicles. | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States | Bryan Salesky | Reveal | |
Babylon | $1.2B | Post-IPO | Babylon aims to provide accessible, affordable healthcare by combining AI with doctors. | London, England, United Kingdom | Ali Parsa | Reveal | |
Olive | $856.3M | Series H | Olive is a developer of an artificial intelligence workforce, automated revenue cycle and claims management for the healthcare industry. | Columbus, Ohio, United States | Bradley Mascho | Reveal | |
Bowery Farming | $625.9M | Venture | Bowery Farming uses vision systems, automation technology, and machine learning to monitor plants and their growth. | New York, New York, United States | Brian Falther | Reveal | |
Builder.ai | $445.0M | Series D | Builder.ai offers a no-code AI-powered app development platform designed to build and operate software projects. | London, England, United Kingdom | Sachin Duggal | Reveal | |
Exscientia | $376.7M | Grant | Exscientia is a pharmatech company that uses an end-to-end AI platform to design and discover new drugs. | Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom | Andrew Hopkins | Reveal | |
Forward | $350.0M | Series E | Forward is a healthcare startup that provides a membership-based health care system. | San Francisco, California, United States | Adrian Aoun | Reveal | |
Coda | $240.0M | Corporate | Coda is a document collaboration platform that brings data and teams together. | San Francisco, California, United States | Alexander DeNeui | Reveal | |
Enfabrica | $240.0M | Series C | Enfabrica is an AI networking chip startup that develops networking solutions for parallel and accelerated computing infrastructure. | Mountain View, California, United States | Rochan Sankar, Shrijeet Mukherjee | Reveal | |
Near Intelligence | $234.0M | Debt | Near is a full-stack data intelligence SaaS platform that curates one of the world’s largest sources of intelligence on people and places. | Pasadena, California, United States | Anil Mathews | Reveal | |
Ghost Autonomy | $217.0M | Series E | Ghost offers attention-free driving by developing a software solution with AI approaches. | Mountain View, California, United States | John Hayes | Reveal | |
Autogrid | $161.0M | Series D | AutoGrid Systems organizes energy data and employs big data analytics to generate real-time predictions that create actionable data. | Redwood City, California, United States | Amit Narayan | Reveal | |
Untether AI | $152.0M | Series B | Untether AI develops AI chips to enable new frontiers in AI applications. | Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Darrick Wiebe | Reveal | |
Better Therapeutics | $150.5M | Post-IPO | Better Therapeutics develops prescription software for treating cardiometabolic diseases. | San Francisco, California, United States | David Perry | Reveal | |
Infogrid | $148.5M | Series B | Analyzes data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to help property managers and owners optimize the performance of their buildings. | London, England, United Kingdom | — | Reveal | |
OctoAI | $131.9M | Series C | OctoAI is an AI infrastructure platform designed to help developers run, tune, and scale generative AI models efficiently. | Seattle, Washington, United States | Jared Roesch | Reveal | |
Sisu | $128.7M | Series C | Sisu is a decision intelligence engine that delivers insights and monitors metrics for businesses to make the right business decisions. | San Francisco, California, United States | Peter Bailis | Reveal | |
AdTheorent | $125.5M | Post-IPO | AdTheorent’s is a machine learning technology powers predictive targeting, predictive creative, and self-learning insights. | New York, New York, United States | Anthony Iacovone | Reveal | |
Gro Intelligence | $117.7M | Venture | Gro Intelligence is a SaaS company that offers an AI-powered decision engine across agriculture, climate, and the economy. | New York, New York, United States | Sara Menker | Reveal | |
Rockset | $117.5M | Series B | Rockset is a real-time indexing database that enables companies to build data applications for the cloud. | San Mateo, California, United States | Dhruba Borthakur, Venkat Venkataramani | Reveal | |
Unlock Real Estate | $110.0M | Note | Unlock is the AI-powered real estate investment manager | New York, New York, United States | Matias Recchia | Reveal | |
Protect AI | $108.5M | Series B | Protect AI is a cybersecurity company that helps in managing security risks and defending against AI security threats. | Seattle, Washington, United States | Badar Ahmed, Daryan (D) Dehghanpisheh, Ian Swanson | Reveal | |
Yokoy | $107.8M | Series B | Yokoy is a financial technology company that offers automated expense, invoicing, and credit card processing. | Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland | Devis Lussi | Reveal | |
Odyssey Therapeutics | $101.6M | Series A | Odyssey Therapeutics is a computational immunology company that develops novel therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases. | San Francisco, California, United States | Kiran Singh | Reveal | |
Balbix | $101.6M | Series C | Balbix offers an AI-native cyber risk and exposure management platform to give security teams a real-time view of their attack surface. | San Jose, California, United States | Gaurav Banga | Reveal | |
Humu | $100.6M | Series C | Humu is a human resource company that affects work through science and machine learning. | Mountain View, California, United States | Jessica Wisdom | Reveal | |
Grabango | $93.8M | Note | Grabango is a checkout-free technology for existing, large-scale grocery, and convenience stores. | Berkeley, California, United States | Will Glaser | Reveal | |
Pachama | $88.3M | Series B | Pachama harnesses AI and satellite data to empower companies to confidently invest in nature. | San Francisco, California, United States | Diego Saez-Gil, Tomas Aftalion | Reveal | |
Aware | $87.0M | Series C | Aware is an AI solution that analyzes human behavior and provides modern governance, risk, and compliance controls. | Columbus, Ohio, United States | James Tsai | Reveal | |
Oculii | $76.1M | Venture | Oculii develops AI Radar Perception Software that significantly enhances ADAS today and enables full autonomous driving in the future. | Dayton, Ohio, United States | Lang Hong | Reveal | |
Tome | $75.3M | Series B | Tome radically changes the way sales teams get deals done, with custom LLMs that assist reps throughout every stage of the sales process. | San Francisco, California, United States | Henri Liriani | Reveal | |
Daedalean | $72.5M | Grant | Daedalean is building autonomous piloting software systems for civil aircraft of today and advanced aerial mobility of tomorrow. | Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland | Anna Chernova | Reveal | |
Mosaic.tech | $71.9M | Series C | Mosaic.tech is a finance platform that provides predictive reporting capabilities to assist with financial strategy and planning. | San Diego, California, United States | Bijan Moallemi | Reveal | |
Prevedere | $67.3M | Note | Prevedere is a provider of predictive analytics technology and solutions based on econometric modeling. | Columbus, Ohio, United States | Rich Wagner | Reveal | |
Streetbees | $63.8M | Note | Streetbees is a human intelligence platform that collects and analyzes offline consumer behavior. | London, England, United Kingdom | Oliver May | Reveal | |
Golden | $59.5M | Series B | Golden is a developer of a self-constructing knowledge database used to accelerate discovery and education. | Claymont, Delaware, United States | Jude Gomila | Reveal | |
Veo Robotics | $57.0M | Series B | Veo Robotics develops smart device solutions to enable high performance collaborative industrial robotics. | Waltham, Massachusetts, United States | Clara Vu | Reveal | |
JOBOX.ai | $56.7M | Series B | Jobox lets pros focus on their job by taking the overhead of managing the finances of a home services business. | Palo Alto, California, United States | Kaushik Pendurthi | Reveal | |
LeapYear Technologies | $53.2M | Venture | LeapYear develops technology for enterprises to securely unlock value from their most sensitive data assets. | San Francisco, California, United States | Christopher Hockenbrocht | Reveal | |
Penten | $53.1M | PE | Penten helps the digital transformation of defence & government - creating, building & operating new cyber tech for the modern workforce. | Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia | Ben Whitham | Reveal | |
VEDA Data Solutions | $52.2M | Series B | VEDA is an AI and machine learning platform to save healthcare and administrative costs. | Madison, Wisconsin, United States | Bob Lindner | Reveal | |
Intellimize | $52.0M | Series B | Intellimize is a startup offering tools for marketers to drive conversions by personalizing websites. | San Francisco, California, United States | Brian Webb | Reveal | |
Deep 6 AI | $50.2M | Undisclosed | Deep 6 AI is a research software that connects all research stakeholders in an AI-powered, real-time ecosystem | Pasadena, California, United States | Wout Brusselaers | Reveal | |
RMX Industries | $50.0M | Post-IPO | RMX Industries specializes in manufacturing rubber hoses and metal auto-retractable hose reels. | Dallas, Texas, United States | — | Reveal | |
Kyndi | $47.4M | Series B | Kyndi's Natural Language Search solution helps organizations find answers in unstructured, text-based data at unmatched speed and precision. | San Mateo, California, United States | Arun Majumdar | Reveal | |
Nautilus Labs | $47.0M | Series B | Nautilus Labs is a technology company that offers decarbonization of the ocean supply chain. | New York, New York, United States | Anthony DiMare | Reveal | |
Armorblox | $46.5M | Venture | Armorblox uses deep learning and natural language technologies to protect enterprise communications. | Sunnyvale, California, United States | Anand Raghavan | Reveal | |
Spectrum Labs | $45.0M | Series B | Spectrum Labs is a technology company that helps build a safer internet through AI content moderation. | San Francisco, California, United States | Jackson Moses | Reveal | |
Robust Intelligence | $44.0M | Series B | Robust Intelligence is a software firm that uses an automated approach to protect companies from AI security and safety vulnerabilities. | San Francisco, California, United States | Alexander Rilee | Reveal | |
Quiq | $44.0M | Series C | Quiq is the only enterprise agentic AI platform that IT, CX, and eCommerce leaders can agree on. | Bozeman, Montana, United States | Michael Myer | Reveal | |
CalypsoAI | $43.2M | Venture | CalypsoAI is an AI security platform that provides agentic red-teaming, real-time defense, and automated security enforcement. | Washington, District of Columbia, United States | Davey Gibian | Reveal | |
TruEra | $42.3M | Series B | TruEra provides AI quality management solutions that test, optimize, and monitor machine learning models. | Redwood City, California, United States | Anupam Datta | Reveal | |
SKAEL | $42.1M | Series A | SKAEL provides a hyper-automation platform used to help companies to automate and power digital employees. | San Francisco, California, United States | Baba Nadimpalli | Reveal | |
Talespin | $40.6M | Series C | Talespin is a software company that develops and builds a virtual, augmented, and mixed reality platform. | Culver City, California, United States | Kyle Jackson | Reveal | |
Formlogic | $40.4M | Debt | Formlogic is an autonomous manufacturing company that uses machine learning and physics simulation to precision parts. | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States | Paul Sutter | Reveal | |
ActZero.ai | $40.0M | Series A | ActZero provides AI-driven managed detection and response for cybersecurity. | Menlo Park, California, United States | John Nurczynski | Reveal | |
Preligens | $39.2M | Note | We develop pioneering technology to empower analysts to take smart actions for a safer world | Paris, Ile-de-France, France | Arnaud Guérin | Reveal | |
OfferFit | $39.0M | Series B | OfferFit is an AI-powered experimentation platform that automates decision-making and personalization for businesses. | Boston, Massachusetts, United States | George Khachatryan, Victor Kostyuk | Reveal | |
Mad Street Den | $38.8M | Series C | Mad Street Den is a computer vision and artificial intelligence startup founded with a mission to make people all over the globe. | Redwood City, California, United States | Costa Colbert | Reveal | |
Sproutt Insurance | $38.0M | Series B | Sproutt is an insurance company that offers people a smarter and easier way to buy life insurance. | Hartford, Connecticut, United States | Assaf Henkin | Reveal | |
Esme Learning Solutions | $37.5M | Venture | Esme Learning is transforming the world's workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution using AI. | Newton, Massachusetts, United States | Beth Porter | Reveal | |
MosaicML | $37.0M | Venture | MosaicML builds an efficient infrastructure for training language models. | San Francisco, California, United States | Naveen Rao | Reveal | |
Orby AI | $34.9M | Venture | Orby AI is an AI platform designed to bring the auto-complete experience to everyday business users and automate all mundane tasks. | Mountain View, California, United States | Bella Liu, Will Lu | Reveal | |
InfinStor | $33.3M | Program | Infinstor is the MLOps Operating System. We offer an enterprise grade MLflow service. | San Jose, California, United States | Jagane Sundar | Reveal | |
Algolux | $32.8M | Series B | Algolux empowers vision systems with the most robust perception technology for all conditions. | Montréal, Quebec, Canada | Allan Benchetrit | Reveal | |
Disperse.io | $32.7M | Series B | Disperse.io is a VC-backed artificial intelligence construction startup focused on improving on-site productivity. | London, England, United Kingdom | Felix Neufeld | Reveal | |
Rovco | $31.5M | Series B | Rovco provides an autonomous underwater vehicle and remotely operated underwater vehicle technologies and support services. | Bristol, Bristol, City of, United Kingdom | Brian Allen | Reveal | |
Kintsugi | $30.9M | Venture | Kintsugi detects signs of clinical depression and anxiety using machine learning and voice biomarkers. | Berkeley, California, United States | Grace Chang | Reveal | |
Metigy | $30.4M | Secondary | Metigy uses AI and deep learning to deliver real time insights and actions that radically enhance reach and converison | North Sydney, New South Wales, Australia | David Fairfull | Reveal | |
CentML | $30.3M | Seed | CentML accelerates Machine Learning workloads by maximizing training and inference efficiency leading to compute cost reduction. | Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Akbar Nurlybayev, Anand Jayarajan, Gennady Pekhimenko, Shang Wang | Reveal | |
Fermyon Technologies | $30.0M | Series A | Fermyon Technologies is a software development company that pioneers the next wave of cloud computing. | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States | Matt Butcher | Reveal | |
Alcion | $29.0M | Series A | Alcion secure data protection from ransomware, malware, accidents, and outages using an AI-driven strategy. | Santa Clara, California, United States | Niraj Tolia, Vaibhav Kamra | Reveal | |
Lokavant | $29.0M | Series A | Lokavant is an IT firm that offers real-time visualizations, risk alerts, artificial intelligence, and human insight services. | New York, New York, United States | Rohit Nambisan | Reveal | |
Predibase | $28.4M | Series A | Predibase is an AI company that develops training, fine-tuning, and serving open-source machine learning. | San Francisco, California, United States | Devvret Rishi, Piero Molino, Travis Addair | Reveal | |
Agot | $27.4M | Note | Agot is a mid-sized late-seed stage startup with a computer vision platform for enterprise foodservice. | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States | Alex Litzenberger | Reveal | |
Ultimate | $27.4M | Program | Ultimate is a virtual agent platform that offers customer service automation. | Berlin, Berlin, Germany | Jaakko Pasanen | Reveal | |
Applica | $27.3M | Venture | Applica is a documentation automation platform. | Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland | Adam Dancewicz | Reveal | |
Edify | $26.9M | Series A | Edify’s mission is to activate the collective power of business users & developers to create experiences employees and customers love. | Boston, Massachusetts, United States | Bracken Fields | Reveal | |
Metaphysic | $25.5M | Series A | Metaphysic specializes in AI-generated, photorealistic content for entertainment, offering tools to protect digital likeness rights. | London, England, United Kingdom | Chris Ume | Reveal | |
Electric Sheep Robotics | $25.5M | Series A | Electric Sheep is vertically integrated robotics company that's transforming the $1Trillion outdoor services industry | San Francisco, California, United States | Gunjit Singh | Reveal | |
Accelex | $24.6M | Series A | Accelex is a data acquisition, analytics, and reporting solutions provider for alternative investors and asset servicers. | London, England, United Kingdom | Franck Vialaron, Michael Aldridge, Nicole Weder | Reveal | |
PlayAI | $23.6M | Seed | PlayAI offers AI voice models for natural and emotive conversations. | Palo Alto, California, United States | Hammad Syed, Mahmoud Felfel | Reveal | |
Humn.ai | $23.1M | Series A | We are a London-based insurtech MGA combining IoT data with geospatial risk models to create per-trip insurance premiums for commercial auto | Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom | Alberto Romero | Reveal | |
Velocity | $22.0M | Series A | AI-First Runtime Observability Platform - Faster incident resolution with actionable, accurate insights | Claymont, Delaware, United States | Kobi Meirson | Reveal | |
Neosec | $20.7M | Series A | Neosec leverages AI-based behavioral analytics to provide unmatched visibility and threat hunting capabilities to stop threat actors. | Palo Alto, California, United States | Giora Engel | Reveal | |
Cushion | $20.2M | Series A | Reimagining the way Americans manage and pay their bills | San Francisco, California, United States | Fazil Mohamood | Reveal | |
Lil Durk | $20.0M | Angel | Lil Durk is a superlative platform designed for augmenting comprehensive news content derived from internationally renowned media outlets. | Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Alexander Elder | Reveal | |
Vaarst | $19.9M | Series B | Vaarst develops robotic analytic solutions for marine applications. | Bristol, Bristol, City of, United Kingdom | Brian Allen | Reveal | |
CloseFactor | $19.6M | Series A | CloseFactor provides automated sales research and contextual insights to improve the productivity of sales teams. | Palo Alto, California, United States | Ben Cheung | Reveal | |
Searchlight | $19.5M | Series A | A Predictive Talent Platform that improves hiring efficiency & Quality of Hire by connecting talent assessments & analytics to outcomes | San Francisco, California, United States | Anna X. Wang | Reveal | |
Loris | $19.1M | Series A | Loris is an AI-powered SaaS platform that turns customer service conversations into the answers you need to make better decisions. | New York, New York, United States | Nancy Lublin | Reveal | |
DreamQuark | $19.1M | Program | DreamQuark provides artificial intelligence solutions for banks, insurance, and asset management firms. | Paris, Ile-de-France, France | Nicolas Meric | Reveal | |
flok | $18.9M | Pre-Seed | flok offers businesses with technology solutions that focus on connecting customers and merchants. | New York, New York, United States | Eran Kirshenboim | Reveal | |
Ubble.ai | $18.7M | Note | Ubble.ai is an online identity verification services. | Paris, Ile-de-France, France | François Wyss | Reveal | |
StructionSite | $18.5M | Venture | StructionSite is a new category of construction software - Intelligent Project Tracking. Cameras and AI automate the tracking of work onsite | Oakland, California, United States | Daniel Zito | Reveal | |
Osmos | $18.0M | Series A | Osmos is an AI‑powered data platform that automates data ingestion, cleanup, and transformation to make raw data analytics‑ready. | Seattle, Washington, United States | Kirat Pandya | Reveal | |
Frame AI (acquired by HubSpot) | $17.9M | Note | A Streaming Generative AI Platform that continuously finds meaning and recommended action in unstructured conversation data. | New York, New York, United States | Brandon Reiss | Reveal | |
DarwinAI | $17.8M | Series A | DarwinAI’s Generative Synthesis 'AI building AI' technology enables optimized and explainable deep learning. | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada | Alexander Wong | Reveal | |
NetSpring | $17.7M | Series A | NetSpring offers tools to analyze product usage, user behavior, and customer experiences across various channels. | Redwood City, California, United States | Abhishek Rai | Reveal |
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many ai startups have failed?
The VCbacked Startup Graveyard currently tracks 390 venture-backed ai startups that have shut down, collectively raising $30.4B before closing. That is roughly 17 percent of all closed companies in the database, which is based on the last five years of fundraising data.
What is the biggest ai startup failure?
By total capital raised, the largest ai failure in the database is Cruise, which raised $16.0B before shutting down.
Why do ai startups fail?
AI is simultaneously the hottest funding category on the planet and one of the largest sections of the graveyard. A gold rush does not lower the failure rate — it just multiplies the number of companies exposed to it, and being in a hot sector is not a moat. Across the dataset, the most common last round before shutdown in ai was Seed, and the largest cohort of failures last raised in 2022.
Can I contact founders of failed ai startups?
Founder names are shown free on this page for every closed ai company. VCbacked paid plans reveal verified founder contact details where available and unlock CSV export.