The infographic above summarizes Adam Hassan’s article Top 10 Startup Failures of 2019 in which he lists down top 10 startups based on their funding size that failed in 2019. Along with it, description about the company, what they tried to achieve is provided and what were the reasons that led to failure. We supplemented the article with additional data around the year of incorporation for each of these startups and plotted them on a scale.
Startups
In recent years there has been an increasing trend for more and more startups popping up and if I have to point out one reason, it would be the cheap capital floating around as interest rates generally are lower which makes getting funding for startups relatively easy. We discuss the problems cheap interest rates bring with them in our infographic Doraemon Economics. Along with it, there are other factors that are also helping: improvements in technology that leads to easy access to skilled professionals, easy access to learning new skills, better access to wider market etc.
Not every startup though meets success. Infact, according to Harvard Business School almost 90% of all tech-centric startups fail. According to Adam’s article, in 2019 553 startups failed with total funding of $1.9bn. Though a startup might fail, the entrepreneurs don’t and the ones that succeed are the ones that keep pursing their dreams one failure after another.
Looking at the list above, Aria Insights and Orix Vision lasted more than a decade before failing in 2019 and the ideas behind them were very revolutionary. Call9, on the other hand, lasted about 4 years and failed being too far ahead. Anki raised closed to $200 million which makes it the highest funded startup to close in 2019 and a failed round of financing was reportedly to blame. Each of these have an interesting story behind them and potentially some deep lessons for the founders to take with them as they move forward.
You may also like…
If you like this infographic, you might also like the following:
Where did Airbus go wrong with the A380? – We look at why Airbus A380 couldn’t even reach the shadow of what Boeing 747 achieved.
Infographic Timeline of Japanese Bullet Train (Shinkansen) – Infographic showing Shinkansen’s timeline along with key historical events.