How the Startup Graveyard is put together
The Startup Graveyard is an archive of 1,744 startups that have shut down. This page explains where the entries come from, what the labels mean and how the figures are calculated.
Sources
- Base entries: companies with a known closing year are taken from Wikidata (CC0 licence). The name, country, sector and founding and closing years come from these records.
- Featured stories (388 entries): written by our team from news archives, company announcements and statements by public bodies. Each one ends with its list of sources.
- Former unicorn list: the Unitard Club compilation was scanned to find missing companies (November 2026). Only companies whose operations ended, confirmed by at least two independent sources, were added to the graveyard.
- Source links are shown on every entry's page. Nothing that is not in a source is written down; unknown fields stay blank.
Labels
- Corporate product (29 entries): a product, brand, unit or country operation set up inside a large company or group, or a service that was part of a large company when it closed. Examples: BuzzFeed News, Morhipo, Dergilik, Skype.
- Turkey: startups founded in Turkey, or that operated in Turkey and shut down.
- Unicorn (97 entries): a company that reached a valuation or market value of at least USD 1 billion at some point. The figure is the value of a single moment, not a completed sale; market value and private round valuations earn the same badge.
Figures
- Average lifespan (10.4 years): calculated from independent startups whose founding and closing years are both known. Corporate products, companies shut down after being acquired and companies that filed for bankruptcy but kept operating are left out. Wikidata's founding year is sometimes the date the company was first registered, so the figure is an approximate indicator.
- Combined unicorn peak ($401.4 billion): the sum of the highest valuations of the entries with the unicorn badge. It adds figures from different years, so it shows the value once assigned, not money lost.
- Known capital burned: the total of investments whose amount is stated in the sources; undisclosed rounds are not included.
- Number of countries: the distinct countries in the entries; different names for the same country count once.
Causes of closure
Each entry is given at most one main cause:
- Ran out of cash
- No market need
- Lost to competitors
- Business model failed
- Team problems
- Regulation and legal issues
- Fraud
- Product problems
- Bad timing
- Macroeconomic crisis
- Acquired and shut down
- Failed pivot
- On Wikidata base entries, causes such as "Acquired and shut down" and "Fraud" are not shown unless a source confirms them.
- For companies in Turkey, the "Fraud" label is used only when there is a final court ruling. Ongoing investigations and court cases are listed under "Regulation and legal issues" and described with words such as "alleged" and "under investigation".
Corrections and objections
If you see a wrong fact, cause or wording in an entry, send a correction request. Requests from founders and employees are reviewed together with their sources; we reply within two business days. To tell us about a missing startup, use the suggestion form.
Data
All entries are in data.json; the featured stories are in llms-full.txt.
Language
The Startup Graveyard was first written in Turkish. The featured stories are translated into English by our team; base entries get a short English summary generated from their structured data.