2026-07-18 · signal
Roughly 3,800 AI startups shut down in 2025 alone. We built a graveyard for them and read the tombstones.
In 2025, roughly 3,800 AI startups shut down, about 27% of the 14,000+ that launched the year before, with another ~1,800 gone in early 2026. We seeded the mymvp Graveyard with the era's most instructive deaths and found four patterns. The wrapper compression: a thin layer over GPT or Claude is a feature waiting to be shipped by the model vendor. The story outran the product: Builder.ai raised over $450M and collapsed into insolvency. Hardware plus cloud equals a kill switch: Humane's Ai Pin was discontinued and customers' $699 devices were remotely disabled. Even giants kill MVPs: OpenAI shut down its Sora social app months after launch.