Ledger & Lore
A boardroom seen from directly above: an empty table surrounded by people

The companies that didn't make it — and exactly why.

Every startup failure, documented from first funding to final closure.

Publicly sourced · Manually verified · Free forever

194
Companies documented
22
Countries
$58.96B
Capital raised, then lost

Explore

The Archive

Search and filter every documented failure.

Insights

Patterns and causes across the data.

Compare

Stack companies side by side.

World Map

Where the most capital was lost.

The landscape

Failure, at a glance.

Funding by country

Circle size = capital raised. Click any country.

USA: $27.27B raised · 124 companies124Canada: $113M raised · 3 companies3Mexico: $53M raised · 1 company1Bahamas: $1.80B raised · 1 company1Colombia: $271M raised · 1 company1UK: $5.45B raised · 17 companies17Germany: $3.69B raised · 8 companies8Israel: $920M raised · 2 companies2Nigeria: $131M raised · 3 companies3Kenya: $140M raised · 2 companies2India: $1.37B raised · 14 companies14China: $3B raised · 2 companies2South Korea: $200M raised · 1 company1Singapore: $76M raised · 3 companies3Indonesia: $0 raised · 1 company1Australia: $227M raised · 3 companies3Seychelles: $16M raised · 1 company1Sweden: $14.07B raised · 2 companies2France: $100M raised · 2 companies2Finland: $60M raised · 1 company1Japan: $0 raised · 1 company1United Arab Emirates: $0 raised · 1 company1

Recent additions

Funding by industry

EV / Battery Manufacturing$14B
Mobility$4.61B
Autonomous Vehicles$3.70B
Health Tech$3.00B
Consumer Hardware$2.25B
Aviation$2.20B
Auto Marketplace$2.17B
Crypto$2.12B
Media & Streaming$2.10B
Grocery Delivery$2.10B
Other$20.70B

Who it's for

Built for anyone who needs the honest version.

Founders

Raising a round? Benchmark against real outcomes — not just the survivor stories.

Small Business Owners

See how others at your stage and in your industry actually fared.

Researchers & Students

Study market patterns and failure modes with sourced, citable data.

Journalists

Get funding history and cause of closure, in context, fast.

Methodology

How this archive is built.

How the data is sourced

Every entry is built from public reporting — court filings, official company statements, and credible news coverage. The sources behind each company are linked on its page.

How “cause of failure” is decided

We assign a single primary cause: the reason most consistently cited across sources. Real failures are rarely monocausal, but one factor usually dominates the story.

What “Undisclosed” means

We never guess at figures that were never publicly reported. A blank or “Undisclosed” field means the number isn’t reliably known — not that it’s zero.

Manually verified, not scraped

This is a hand-built archive. Every company was read, checked against its sources, and entered by a person — not pulled by an automated scraper.

194 cautionary tales, one searchable archive.

Search and filter every company by country, industry, and cause of failure.

Enter the Archive →

Or read: Why Startups Fail: patterns from nearly 200 companies