102 startups. all documented.

They built.
They burned. Failed.

A curated archive of startups that raised capital, hired teams, and chased product‑market fit — but didn't make it. Real case studies. No spin.

Browse ArchiveData source ↓
0
Case Studies
0
Shut Down
0
Acquired
0
YC Backed
scroll
The Archive102 / 102
#001inactive

Abbot

Abbot was a Slack-native customer success tool built by A Serious Business, Inc., a Y Combinator S21 company co-founded by Paul Nakata (CEO) and Phil Haack (CTO) in May 2020. The product began as a hosted ChatOps platform—a spiritual successor to GitHub's Hubot—before pivoting in 2021 to help eng…

Summer 2021
Read →
#002inactive

Abel

Abel was a San Francisco-based legal technology startup founded in 2023 that aimed to transform document review for litigation teams using AI-powered entity extraction.The company entered Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch with a clear thesis: existing eDiscovery platforms help attorneys locate doc…

Winter 2024
Read →
#003inactive

AI.Fashion

AI.Fashion was a Los Angeles-based AI startup founded in 2020 and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch. The company built a generative AI platform for fashion brands, enabling them to produce photorealistic product photography from CAD designs — without physical photoshoots, physical samples,…

Summer 2020
Read →
#004inactive

Allo

Allo was a San Francisco-based mobile app, founded by Catherine Hrdy and backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, that aimed to help neighboring families exchange non-monetary favors — babysitting, carpools, pet-sitting, and playdates — through a karma-based reciprocity system.The company's co…

Winter 2019
Read →
#005acquired

Allure Systems

Allure Systems was a New York- and Paris-based AI company that used generative machine learning to produce on-figure fashion photography for eCommerce retailers — without models, photographers, or studios.Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Gabrielle Chou and computer vision specialist Jeremy …

Winter 2019
Read →
#006inactive

Argovox

Argovox was a Y Combinator S22 company that built AI voice agents for patient billing and collections in the US healthcare market.Founded in 2022 by Nelson Munoz and Luis Pellerano under the legal entity Ruffo Inc., the company raised only the standard $500K YC pre-seed check and never announced …

Summer 2022
Read →
#007inactive

Atmos

Atmos was a San Francisco-based homebuilding marketplace that operated from approximately 2018 until March 2025. The company positioned itself as an end-to-end platform for custom home design and construction, connecting buyers in Sun Belt and Southeast markets with vetted builders, handling desi…

Summer 2020
Read →
#008inactive

Basilica

Basilica was a San Francisco-based developer API company founded on December 15, 2018, and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch. The company built an embedding API that converted images and text into high-dimensional numerical vectors — the mathematical representations that power machine lear…

Winter 2019
Read →
#009inactive

Bifrost

Bifrost was a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2021 that built crypto estate planning tools — specifically, smart contracts designed to automatically transfer digital assets upon a holder's death. The company participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, receiving the standard $500,000 …

Winter 2022
Read →
#010inactive

BlackOakTV

BlackOakTV was a subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform founded in 2020 by Uzo Ometu and Iyanu Obidele, designed to serve Black viewers and independent Black creators who were systematically underrepresented on mainstream streaming services.The company launched publicly on February 5, 2021,…

Summer 2021
Read →
#011acquired

Booth AI

Booth AI was a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company founded in August 2022 by Nick Locascio, Ian Baldwin, and Mitra Morgan. The company built a "virtual photoshoot as a service" platform for e-commerce brands: sellers submitted basic product photos, and Booth AI's generative AI pipeline returned …

Winter 2023
Read →
#012acquired

Breaker

Breaker was a San Francisco-based podcast application founded in 2016 by Erik Berlin and Leah Culver that attempted to transform podcast listening from a solitary activity into a social experience.The company's core thesis was that friend-driven discovery—seeing what people you follow are listeni…

Winter 2017
Read →
#013acquired

Brevy

Brevy was a San Francisco-based B2B software startup founded in July 2020 by Mohamed Abedelmalik, Conder Shou, and Anika Zaman. The company entered Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch — conducted entirely remotely due to COVID-19 — and raised a seed round backed by YC, Madrona Venture, Fuel Capital,…

Summer 2020
Read →
#014acquired

Bump

Bump Technologies was a Mountain View, California-based mobile startup founded in 2008 by David Lieb, Andy Huibers, and Jake Mintz. The company built a consumer app that let two smartphone users exchange contacts, photos, and files by physically bumping their phones together — a gesture-based int…

Summer 2009
Read →
#015inactive

Buzzle

Buzzle (legally q&ai Technologies, Inc.) was a New York-based B2B SaaS company that participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. The company built an NLP-powered platform that automatically analyzed libraries of recorded sales and customer success calls to surface voice-of-customer trends, c…

Summer 2021
Read →
#016inactive

Cache

Cache was a Y Combinator Summer 2021 company that attempted to bring convenience store delivery to suburban markets through a network of miniaturized, automated dark stores — proprietary vending-style units called Cache Units — listed as storefronts on DoorDash, UberEats, and Instacart.Founded by…

Summer 2021
Read →
#017inactive

Call9

Call9 was a Brooklyn-based healthcare startup that embedded paramedics and nurses inside skilled nursing facilities 24/7, connecting them via a proprietary telemedicine platform to remote emergency medicine physicians within one minute.Founded in 2015 by ER physician Timothy Peck, Stanford radiol…

Summer 2015
Read →
#018inactive

CapWay

CapWay was an Atlanta-based neobank founded in 2016 by Sheena Allen to serve the 52 million financially underserved Americans living in banking deserts — rural and low-income communities with no nearby physical bank branch.The company offered a debit card, money transfer tools, savings features, …

Summer 2020
Read →
#019acquired

Cardinal

Cardinal (Cardinal Web, Inc.) was an AI-powered product backlog platform founded in January 2023 by Nadav "Wiz" Weizmann and Mor Sela in Austin, Texas. The company participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and built a "system of record for product teams" — software that aggregated customer…

Winter 2023
Read →
#020acquired

Cardpool

Cardpool was a San Francisco-based gift card exchange marketplace founded in 2009 by Anson Tsai and Timothy Wong. The company built a two-sided platform where consumers could sell unwanted gift cards for up to 90% of face value and buy discounted cards at up to 30% off — capturing the spread as r…

Winter 2010
Read →
#021acquired

Clear Genetics

Clear Genetics was a San Francisco-based genomics software company founded in 2016 that built AI-guided workflow tools to address a structural bottleneck in clinical genetics: too few genetic counselors to serve a rapidly growing volume of patients being sequenced.The company's core product, Gia …

Winter 2017
Read →
#022acquired

Clever

Clever was a San Francisco-based EdTech infrastructure company founded in June 2012 by Tyler Bosmeny, Dan Carroll, and Rafael Garcia — three Harvard classmates who met in Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch. The company built a standardized API and single sign-on platform that connected K-12 school …

Summer 2012
Read →
#023acquired

Cloudstitch

Cloudstitch was a Y Combinator-backed developer tool (S15) that let designers and small businesses power websites and mobile apps directly from Google Spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel—replacing traditional server-side databases with software people already knew how to use.Founded in September 201…

Summer 2015
Read →
#024inactive

CodeParrot AI

CodeParrot AI was a Y Combinator W23 startup that set out to accelerate frontend development by converting Figma designs and screenshots into production-ready code.Founded in 2022 by Royal Jain and Vedant Agarwala—two engineers with credible prior exits—the company raised $500K in pre-seed fundin…

Winter 2023
Read →
#025inactive

CodeStory

CodeStory was a London-based AI coding tool startup, founded in 2023 by Sandeep Pani and Naresh Ramesh as part of Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch.The company built Aide, an AI-native IDE forked from VSCode, with a privacy-first local architecture and a focus on multi-file agentic code editing. O…

Summer 2023
Read →
#026inactive

CoffeeAI

CoffeeAI was a Y Combinator-backed startup (W22) that built a ChatGPT-powered Chrome extension for generating hyper-personalized sales outreach messages on LinkedIn and via cold email.The company began its life in 2019 as Segna, a machine-learning data wrangling platform, before executing a full …

Winter 2022
Read →
#027acquired

Compound

Compound was a San Francisco-based wealth management firm founded in 2019 by Jordan Gonen and Jacob Schein to serve tech employees navigating complex, illiquid compensation—startup equity, stock options, cryptocurrency, and venture investments. The company raised $37 million, including a marquee …

Summer 2019
Read →
#028acquired

Creative Market

Creative Market is an online marketplace for user-generated design assets — fonts, graphics, templates, illustrations, icons, and web themes — founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius Monsef. The company emerged from a deliberate pivot away from COLOURlovers, …

Winter 2010
Read →
#029inactive

CreatorML

CreatorML was a New York-based B2B SaaS company founded in 2022 by Charles Weill, a former Google Research machine learning lead, that used ML models to help YouTube creators predict how many views a title or thumbnail change would generate before publishing.Accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 20…

Winter 2023
Read →
#030acquired

CrowdAI

CrowdAI was a San Francisco-based computer vision company founded in 2016 by Devaki Raj, Nicolas Borensztein, and Pablo Garcia.The company began as a hybrid human-and-machine image annotation service for satellite, drone, and autonomous vehicle imagery, then pivoted in 2021 to a no-code platform …

Summer 2016
Read →
#031acquired

Cryptoseal

CryptoSeal was a San Francisco-based security startup founded in May 2011 by Ryan Lackey, Tom Sparks, and Erik Berls. Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch, the company built two distinct products: CryptoSeal Privacy, a consumer VPN launched in mid-2013, and CryptoSeal Connect, a complia…

Summer 2011
Read →
#032inactive

CustomerOS

CustomerOS was a London-based B2B SaaS startup founded in early 2022 by three alumni of Voxbone — Matt Brown, Jonty Knox, and Vasilica Coscotin. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), Seedcamp, and a syndicate of 30+ angels, the company raised $2.1–2.6M at pre-seed and set out to solve the fragmented cust…

Summer 2022
Read →
#033inactive

deepsilicon

Deepsilicon was a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup that participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. Founded by Abhinav Reddy (CEO) and Alexander Nanda (CTO), the company built software and hardware to run transformer-based neural networks faster and at lower cost, using a techn…

Summer 2024
Read →
#034inactive

Demo Gorilla

Demo Gorilla was a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS startup, founded in 2021 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, that built a browser extension giving sales representatives AI-generated, persona-customized talking points during live software demos.The company's core thesis was that even the…

Winter 2022
Read →
#035inactive

Dialect

Dialect was a Palo Alto-based AI startup that built a browser extension to auto-draft responses to vendor questionnaires—RFPs, security assessments, and due diligence questionnaires (DDQs)—using generative AI grounded in a company's own internal content.Founded in 2022 by three technically creden…

Summer 2022
Read →
#036inactive

Elpha

Elpha was a moderated professional community and hiring platform for women in tech, founded by Cadran Cowansage, Abadesi Osunsade, and Kuan Luo. It originated as an internal Y Combinator project called "Leap" in 2017, spun out as an independent company in February 2019, and completed YC's Summer …

Summer 2019
Read →
#037acquired

Escher Reality

Escher Reality was a Y Combinator Summer 2017 company that built backend infrastructure for cross-platform, multi-user, and persistent mobile augmented reality experiences.Founded in early 2016 by MIT roboticist Ross Finman and computer vision engineer Diana Hu, the company identified a genuine g…

Summer 2017
Read →
#038inactive

Fabius

Fabius Technologies was a San Francisco-based AI startup that built a sales coaching and deal-scoring layer on top of existing conversation intelligence tools like Gong and Chorus.Founded in September 2020 by two former LiveRamp engineers, the company spent over two years in stealth before enteri…

Winter 2023
Read →
#039inactive

Fable

Fable was a New York-based B2B productivity startup founded in 2020 by Aravindh Dorai and Alex Chumbley. The company participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch and built a collaborative product specification editor that synced two-way with issue trackers like Jira, Linear, Productboard, and…

Winter 2021
Read →
#040inactive

Flike

Flike was a San Francisco-based B2B software startup founded in 2021 and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch.The company launched as a "GitHub for spreadsheets"—a collaboration and version-control layer for finance teams using Excel and Google Sheets—before pivoting twice: first to an …

Winter 2022
Read →
#041acquired

FutureAdvisor

FutureAdvisor was a San Francisco-based robo-advisory platform founded in 2010 by Bo Lu and Jon Xu, two former Microsoft program managers who graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2010 batch. The company built a free portfolio analysis tool and a paid automated investment management service, targe…

Summer 2010
Read →
#042acquired

Gigster

Gigster built a managed marketplace for software development that matched enterprise clients with a curated network of elite freelance engineers, wrapping the entire engagement in AI-powered quoting, project management tooling, and quality guarantees.Founded in 2013 and launched through Y Combina…

Summer 2015
Read →
#043acquired

Heysan

Heysan was a mobile instant messaging aggregator founded on January 24, 2007, by Gustaf Alstromer, Marie Brattberg, Pär Lindhe, and Michael Ossareh. Part of Y Combinator's Winter 2007 batch, the company built a free, ad-supported mobile app that unified MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Google …

Winter 2007
Read →
#044inactive

Jasmine Energy

Jasmine Energy was a Washington, DC-based climate tech startup founded in 2022 and accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch. The company set out to modernize the Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) market — a $5–10 billion segment of the clean energy economy where solar owners earn tradeable…

Summer 2022
Read →
#045inactive

LendUp

LendUp was a San Francisco-based fintech lender founded in 2011 and incubated at Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch.Its core product, the "LendUp Ladder," promised underbanked Americans a path out of the payday loan trap: borrow responsibly, complete financial education courses, and earn lower inte…

Winter 2012
Read →
#046acquired

Level

Level was a San Francisco-based fintech lender founded in 2021 by Vladimir Korshin, Asa Schachar, and Molly Hogan under the legal entity Asabase, Inc. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and built a warehouse lending product for early-stage fintech startups — companies th…

Summer 2021
Read →
#047acquired

Loopt

Loopt was a location-based social networking service founded in 2005 by Sam Altman, Nick Sivo, and Alok Deshpande.The company allowed mobile users to share their real-time GPS location with friends, receive proximity alerts when contacts were nearby, and discover local places and events. Loopt la…

Summer 2005
Read →
#048inactive

Lotus

Lotus was a commercial open-source (COSS) pricing and billing engine founded in 2022 by Mikael Nida and Diego Escobedo through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch.The company built an MIT-licensed, self-hosted platform that let API, SaaS, and fintech companies automate usage-based pricing across met…

Summer 2022
Read →
#049inactive

Make School

Make School launched in 2012 as MakeGamesWithUs, a Y Combinator-backed iOS game publishing platform and CS summer camp.By 2014, it had pivoted into something far more ambitious: a two-year, project-based alternative to a four-year computer science degree, financed through income share agreements …

Winter 2012
Read →
#050inactive

Memo

Memo was a messaging application founded in 2019 by Peter Saxton and Richard Shepherd in Exeter, UK. The company entered Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch with a pitch to replace email and Slack with a calmer, richer form of asynchronous communication — one that let users comment on individual wor…

Summer 2020
Read →
#051inactive

Mercator

Mercator Technologies (YC S22) was a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2022 by Andrew Duberstein and Dayton Thorpe, two data practitioners who met at Instacart.The company attempted two distinct product strategies in under two years: first, a geospatial fleet management suite targeting vehic…

Summer 2022
Read →
#052inactive

Mindmesh

Mindmesh was a Boston-based productivity startup, part of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, that set out to build a "virtual desk" — a unified workspace for product managers and knowledge workers drowning in tool fragmentation.The company conducted extensive pre-launch research, achieved SOC 2 Ty…

Summer 2021
Read →
#053inactive

Mini Exhibitions

Mini Exhibitions was a New York-based B2B virtual events company that graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. Founded by John Friel and John Sillings, the company offered fully managed virtual experiences for remote corporate teams — art tours, mixology classes, lockpicking workshops, an…

Winter 2020
Read →
#054acquired

NeoWize

NeoWize was a Tel Aviv-based e-commerce personalization startup that applied behavioral machine learning to help small and mid-size online retailers surface relevant products to new visitors faster than existing solutions.Founded in 2016 by three IDF intelligence veterans and backed by Y Combinat…

Summer 2016
Read →
#055inactive

Neptyne

Neptyne was a Brooklyn-based startup that built what it called "the first natively programmable spreadsheet" — a product that embedded a full Python and Jupyter runtime directly inside a spreadsheet interface.Founded in 2022 by two former Sidewalk Labs engineers, Douwe Osinga and Jack Amadeo, the…

Winter 2023
Read →
#056inactive

Nophin

Nophin was a New York-based startup founded in 2021 that participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. The company launched as a vertical fintech platform offering residential landlords a way to advance future rental income — positioned explicitly as neither debt nor equity. Within months of …

Winter 2022
Read →
#057inactive

Onsite Pro

Onsite Pro, incorporated as Greenwork Inc. in March 2021, was a San Francisco-based startup that passed through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. Over roughly three years, the company executed two full pivots: first from a clean energy workforce training platform ("a Coursera for solar") to a hir…

Summer 2021
Read →
#058inactive

Openland

Openland was a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2017 by Yury Lifshits and Steve Korshakov that graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch.The company began as a niche real estate marketplace targeting urban land development stakeholders, then executed a sweeping pivot to build a horizo…

Winter 2018
Read →
#059inactive

Opkit

Opkit was a New York-based healthcare technology startup, founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, that built AI-powered phone call automation for the US healthcare industry.The company began as an insurance verification platform for telehealth companies, then pivoted in Au…

Summer 2021
Read →
#060acquired

Optimizely

Optimizely was founded in 2010 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, both former Google employees, as a self-serve A/B testing and website optimization platform. Built on the insight that non-technical marketers needed a way to run experiments without engineering support, the company grew from a YC Win…

Winter 2010
Read →
#061inactive

Ozone

Ozone was a San Francisco-based startup that built a browser-native, AI-powered collaborative video editor, positioning itself as "Figma for video." Founded in 2021 by MIT dropout Max von Wolff and backed by $7.22M from NEA, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator, the company's core thesis was that v…

Winter 2022
Read →
#062acquired

Palifer

Palifer was a San Jose-based industrial AI startup founded in May 2019 by brothers Emerson Hsieh and Morris Hsieh. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch and built a deep-learning NLP algorithm that extracted structured, actionable data from the messy, misspelled, and incons…

Summer 2019
Read →
#063inactive

Parabolic

Parabolic (legal name: Parabolic Intel, Corp.) was a San Francisco-based AI startup that built an automated draft-response tool for customer support teams.Founded in late 2022 by Shub Viragi and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, the company integrated directly into Intercom, Zendesk…

Winter 2023
Read →
#064inactive

Piggy

Piggy was an Indian fintech startup that offered commission-free direct mutual fund investing through a mobile app, positioning itself as the "mobile-first Vanguard for India." Founded in 2016 by two ex-Nomura investment bankers and an ex-Amazon technologist, the company entered Y Combinator's S1…

Summer 2017
Read →
#065inactive

Pit.AI

Pit.AI Technologies was a Y Combinator-backed AI hedge fund that aimed to replace human-generated trading hypotheses with reinforcement learning, eliminate the traditional 2-and-20 fee structure, and "solve intelligence for investment management." Founded in December 2016 by Yves-Laurent Kom Samo…

Winter 2017
Read →
#066inactive

Pixelapse

Pixelapse was a Y Combinator-backed startup (W12) that built version control and collaboration software for designers — internally described as "GitHub for designers." Founded in 2011 by Shravan Reddy and Min Ming Lo in Palo Alto, the company solved a genuine, observed workflow problem: designers…

Winter 2012
Read →
#067acquired

Plasticity

Plasticity was a San Francisco-based NLP infrastructure company founded in 2016 by Alex Sands and Ajay Patel, two University of Pennsylvania M&T graduates who had previously worked on natural language interfaces at Apple Siri and Google, respectively.The company built a full-stack suite of NLP AP…

Summer 2017
Read →
#068inactive

Playmaker

Playmaker was a Copenhagen-based mobile app founded in 2019 by Neil Murray and Helder Almeida, targeting the 7–8 million players of Fantasy Premier League (FPL). The app offered league-specific group chats, live match updates, and player statistics — a social layer designed to sit on top of the e…

Winter 2021
Read →
#069acquired

Posterous

Posterous launched in 2008 with a genuinely elegant premise: email any content to a single address, and the platform handles the rest—formatting, hosting, and cross-posting to every major social network.That simplicity drove 30% month-over-month growth in 2009 and 15 million monthly unique visito…

Summer 2008
Read →
#070acquired

Preflight

Preflight was a Chicago-area no-code web testing startup founded in 2018 by Mustafa Bayramoglu. The company built a Chrome extension-based platform that let non-engineers record, run, and maintain automated browser tests without writing a single line of code — a direct response to the brittleness…

Winter 2019
Read →
#071inactive

Queenly

Queenly was a San Francisco-based vertical marketplace for formalwear, founded in 2019 by Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou-Patel and active through approximately late 2024. The company built a peer-to-peer resale platform for prom, pageant, quinceañera, and wedding dresses, layering in machine lear…

Winter 2021
Read →
#072inactive

Quest

Quest was a short-form asynchronous audio Q&A platform built around career advice, where experts recorded answers to vetted questions in under five minutes.Founded in Amsterdam in 2018 as Cooper—a private introduction-based professional network—the company pivoted twice before shutting down in 20…

Summer 2021
Read →
#073inactive

Quickcard

Quickcard was a B2B sales enablement startup founded in 2020 by Mathew Pregasen and Rikhav Shah as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. Operating under at least three names — Parsegon, Battlecard, and finally Quickcard — the company built a tool that let sales representatives create personal…

Winter 2020
Read →
#074inactive

RadMate AI

RadMate AI was a San Francisco-based healthcare AI startup founded in 2023 by Mohamed Khalifa and Adam Skrocki, two Cornell Computer Science alumni accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. The company built an AI copilot for radiologists — a workflow tool that listened to dictated findings…

Winter 2024
Read →
#075acquired

Raven Tech

Raven Tech (渡鸦科技) was a Beijing-based AI startup founded in May 2014 with an audacious thesis: replace the smartphone's app-based interface with a voice-driven, "shell-free" operating system that could execute complex, multi-step tasks on a user's behalf.The company earned extraordinary instituti…

Winter 2015
Read →
#076acquired

Ravti

Ravti was a commercial real estate software company founded by Alex Rangel and Chris Ginter, operating from approximately 2012 to 2020. The company built a platform to digitize, manage, and procure HVAC systems for commercial property owners — solving a problem that Rangel had witnessed firsthand…

Summer 2014
Read →
#077acquired

Remade

Remade was a San Francisco-based AI startup founded in 2024 by four Cambridge University computer science graduates. Incorporated as Pheat, Inc., the company entered Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch with a focused pitch: automate video ad workflows for lifestyle brands using generative AI, replac…

Summer 2024
Read →
#078inactive

Reverie Labs

Reverie Labs was a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI drug discovery company founded in 2017 by Jonah Kallenbach, Ankit Gupta, and Connor Duffy. The company began as a B2B SaaS business selling machine learning tools to pharmaceutical companies, then pivoted twice — first to selling ML-designed dr…

Winter 2018
Read →
#079acquired

SafeBase

SafeBase was a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company founded in 2020 by Al Yang and Adar Arnon through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch. The company built the "Smart Trust Center" — a platform that allowed software vendors to proactively publish their security and compliance posture to prospective…

Summer 2020
Read →
#080acquired

Shiok Meats

Shiok Meats was a Singapore-based cellular agriculture startup founded in August 2018 by Dr. Sandhya Sriram and Dr. Ka Yi Ling, two former stem cell scientists from Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The company pioneered an entirely new category — cultivated crusta…

Winter 2019
Read →
#081inactive

ShopWith

ShopWith was a San Francisco-based mobile commerce startup founded in October 2017 by Aaron Chou, Melody Kim, and Lewis Chung. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch and pitched itself as "mobile QVC for Gen Z" — a platform where shoppers could browse virtual storefronts alo…

Summer 2018
Read →
#082acquired

SimpleCitizen

SimpleCitizen was a Salt Lake City-based legal technology startup that built a guided, software-driven platform to help immigrants navigate US citizenship and visa applications — positioning itself as "TurboTax for immigration." Founded in 2015 by Sam Stoddard, Brady Stoddard, and Aydé Soto Wrigh…

Summer 2016
Read →
#083acquired

Soomgo

Soomgo (operating entity: Brave Mobile, Ltd.) launched in December 2014 in Seoul, South Korea, as a horizontal local services marketplace connecting consumers with skilled professionals across more than 1,000 service categories — from piano lessons and wedding planning to interior design, pet tra…

Winter 2017
Read →
#084inactive

Sorted

Sorted was a SaaS management platform founded in 2022 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. The company entered Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch with a two-person team and a product it described as "the first completely automated SaaS management software." Its core promise was to replace spre…

Winter 2023
Read →
#085inactive

Souffle Club

Souffle Club was a San Francisco-based professional networking startup that entered Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch with a simple pitch: build a "10x better LinkedIn alternative" where rich profiles replaced traditional resumes. Founded in January 2019 by Pradeep Muthukrishnan, the company opera…

Summer 2019
Read →
#086acquired

Sqreen

Sqreen was an application security platform founded in Paris in 2015 by Pierre Betouin and Jean-Baptiste Aviat, two former members of Apple's offensive security Red Team. The company built a lightweight microagent — analogous to an APM agent — that instrumented web applications from the inside, d…

Winter 2018
Read →
#087inactive

Station

Station was a Paris-based desktop productivity application that operated from 2017 to approximately 2021. Built inside eFounders, a B2B SaaS startup studio, and later accelerated through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch, Station aggregated a user's entire suite of SaaS web applications — Slack, G…

Winter 2018
Read →
#088inactive

Storyline

Storyline was a Y Combinator-backed startup (Winter 2018) founded in September 2017 by Vasili Shynkarenka and Maksim Abramchuk, two Belarusian entrepreneurs who had previously run Botcube, a software agency building chatbots and voice apps for clients. The company built a drag-and-drop, browser-b…

Winter 2018
Read →
#089inactive

StrongIntro

StrongIntro was a San Francisco-based recruiting startup that participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch.The company built a referral-sourcing product that parsed employees' social and professional networks to surface warm candidates for open engineering roles, delivering results through in…

Winter 2016
Read →
#090inactive

Struct

Struct was a Y Combinator-backed startup that built a platform for multi-lingual, real-time AI voice agents capable of handling phone-based tasks across industries including fintech, legaltech, SaaS, and CRM. Founded in 2023 and accepted into YC's Winter 2023 cohort, the company operated out of a…

Winter 2023
Read →
#091inactive

Sublingual

Sublingual was a two-person Y Combinator Winter 2025 company founded by Matthew Tang and Dylan Bowman in San Francisco. Despite being listed in the YC directory as a "daily productivity tracker" — almost certainly a placeholder or relic of an earlier concept — the company actually built an open-s…

Winter 2025
Read →
#092acquired

Tech in Asia

Tech in Asia began in 2010 as a student blog called Penn Olson, founded by Willis Wee during his third year at Singapore Management University. Over the following decade, it grew into the dominant English-language technology media brand for Southeast Asia, operating a news platform, a startup dat…

Winter 2015
Read →
#093acquired

Telivy

Telivy was a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup founded in 2021 by Naren Sathiya, Ben Grosser, and Venkata Vijay Ventrapragada. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and set out to automate cybersecurity risk assessments for small and medium-sized businesses, initial…

Summer 2021
Read →
#094inactive

The Muse

The Muse launched in 2011 as a values-driven alternative to legacy job boards, betting that job seekers would pay a premium — in attention and loyalty — for transparent, behind-the-scenes views of company culture before applying. The company built genuine product differentiation through rich visu…

Winter 2012
Read →
#095inactive

Tress

Tress was a vertical social network built for Black women to discover, share, and discuss hairstyles.Founded by three African women software engineers who met at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana, the company launched in Nigeria in February 2016 and attract…

Winter 2017
Read →
#096acquired

Triplebyte

Triplebyte launched in 2015 with a genuinely contrarian thesis: that the technical hiring process systematically failed engineers by overweighting credentials and underweighting demonstrated skill. Its original product — a blind, resume-free common application to Y Combinator portfolio companies …

Summer 2015
Read →
#097inactive

Tutorspree

Tutorspree was a New York-based online marketplace that connected students with local private tutors across K-12 subjects.Founded in 2010 and graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2011 class, the company pitched itself as the "Airbnb for tutoring" — a platform where parents could browse tutor prof…

Winter 2011
Read →
#098inactive

Tydo

Tydo was a direct-to-consumer analytics platform founded in 2020 by Manav Kohli and Scott Sonneborn under the legal entity PolyOps, Inc. Operating out of the Y Combinator S20 batch, the company built a no-code dashboard that consolidated fragmented DTC data — Shopify orders, Facebook Ads spend, K…

Summer 2020
Read →
#099inactive

Vizly

Vizly was a Y Combinator-backed startup (S23) that built an AI-powered business intelligence tool allowing users to query and visualize data using plain English.Founded in 2023 by Ali Shobeiri and Sami Sahnoune, two McGill University graduates with directly relevant experience at Apple, Microsoft…

Summer 2023
Read →
#100acquired

Vizzly

Vizzly was a London-based B2B SaaS startup that built an embeddable analytics platform for software companies. Founded in December 2021 by Matt Williamson and James Bowers, it participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch and offered SaaS companies a way to embed customizable, customer-facing …

Summer 2022
Read →
#101inactive

VOIQ

VOIQ was a B2B SaaS company that promised to automate business phone calls using conversational AI voicebots.Founded in 2014 and backed by Y Combinator (S15), the company raised approximately $5 million over eight years and cycled through three distinct product identities: an on-demand human call…

Summer 2015
Read →
#102acquired

ZeroStorefront

ZeroStorefront (legal entity: Eatgeek Inc.) was a restaurant data and marketing automation platform founded around 2018–2019 by two former Grubhub insiders, Collin Wallace and Ashutosh Joshi. The company emerged from Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch with a clear thesis: restaurants were being kep…

Winter 2019
Read →
Data Source & Attribution

Built on someone
else's groundwork.

All 102 case studies on this site were originally scraped from startups.rip — a fantastic community archive of startup post-mortems. I built this site as a personal project while learning how to reverse-engineer web data and turn raw content into a clean, readable interface. All credit for the research and writing behind every case study belongs to the original authors and contributors at startups.rip.

startups.rip
The original startup post-mortem archive

⚠This is a personal learning project — no commercial use intended. If you are the owner of any content published here and would like it removed, please reach out.

startups.rip ↗