$27bn in investment lost over failure of 3,200 startups

Just over $27 billion in venture funding was raised by the 3,200 startups that failed in 2023, The New York Times reported, citing figures from startup tracker PitchBook.

That’s close to the amount raised by startups from venture capital in the third quarter of 2023 ($29.8 billion), according to accounting firm EY.

However, the $27.2 billion figure likely underrepresents the true scale of the cash burn, as many companies will have failed without any fanfare. And notably, the tally doesn’t include major losses from public companies or those that were acquired.

For instance, coworking company WeWork raised more than $11 billion before its IPO, and filed for bankruptcy in November. And college financial aid startup Frank was acquired by JPMorgan in 2021 for $175 million, before being shuttered in January over fraudulent customer figures.

This year’s seen a string of high-profile startup failures. Pizza startup Zume, which raised nearly $500 million, shut down in June after struggling to make its pizza automation technology work.

Convoy, the freight startup that was once hailed as the “Uber for trucking” and raised more than $1 billion, shut down in November.

This year’s startup troubles led Tom Loverro, a general partner at investment firm IVP, to call it a “mass extinction event” for startups.

These troubles stem partly from the decline in funding. There’s been a drought in VC funding compared with 2022, with $104.5 billion raised in the first nine months of the year versus $183.9 billion in the same period last year, per EY.