They burned.
We documented it.

One regulatory announcement in July 2021 destroyed 17Zuoye and its $350M investment overnight — the Chinese government banned for-profit K-12 tutoring and ended an entire sector

Hamburg Airbnb competitor raised 12 million euros, survived eight years in the shadow of Airbnb, and was absorbed by Wimdu right before both shut down.

Ivory Coast's agriculture AI that needed the cocoa industry to care about algorithms

Abidjan's e-commerce pioneer collapsed under cash-on-delivery fraud and logistics costs

Endpoint resilience pioneer taken private by Crosspoint Capital after losing ground

Silicon Valley agtech startup that built the world's first autonomous apple-picking robot but shut down when commercial deployment proved too expensive.

Online learning startup that rode the COVID wave but couldn't survive after it

Electric propulsion for CubeSats that could not reach commercial orbit

The Ghanaian fintech that MTN killed by pulling the ladder

Achaogen spent 15 years developing a new antibiotic, won FDA approval in June 2018 — and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in April 2019, just 10 months after approval, because hospital purchasing refused to pay for its drug.

Southeast Asia ecommerce enabler raised $70M then sold at discount as Lazada and Shopee dominated

Gothenburg's green acrylic startup couldn't scale bio-based plastics economics to commercial viability

Legal billing intelligence startup raised $15M but law firms refused to adopt AI billing analysis

Addi raised 145 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz to bring BNPL to Colombian and Brazilian retail — and exited Brazil, cut 25 percent of staff, and wrote down its valuation in 2022 when its credit book could not survive rising rates in markets with already-high consumer default rates.

Digitizing the Horn of Africa's most strategic port

Spain's programmatic platform that Google and Meta turned into a rounding error

Mexico's adtech that Google's Spanish targeting update made unnecessary

Argentina's adtech platform destroyed by the same devaluations that destroyed its clients' ad budgets

Colombia's programmatic advertising platform that Google and Facebook made irrelevant

Honduras's adtech startup for a digital advertising market smaller than a US mid-size city

Peru's programmatic advertising platform that couldn't survive in a market Google owned

FMCW LiDAR pioneer SPAC'd at $2.1B but autonomous vehicle market moved too slowly

LiDAR startup SPAC valuation collapsed as autonomous vehicle timelines slipped by years

MIT-born emotion AI pioneer acquired by Smart Eye — a cautionary tale of niche AI markets.