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title: 400+ startup deaths
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| 5x the secondaries.  Voice AI FDEs. Future of robotics.    View in browser March 12, 2026 Runaway runway Hi there,   Here is this week's Hot or Not. Hot: Secondary rounds   Secondary rounds are 5x more common among private companies than a decade ago.   Among private companies leveraging secondaries, nearly 1 in 3 run multiple secondary rounds, giving founders, employees, and early investors liquidity before a traditional exit. This shift enables more value creation to stay in private markets: OpenAI, now valued at $840B, has completed 4 secondary rounds to date.   See how else private markets are evolving in our recent State of Venture report.   Not: Zero runway   70% of startups that shut down since 2023 cite running out of capital as a cause of death.    In fact, the hundreds of startups whose failures we analyzed raised a combined $17.5B before going under. But the more telling causes, like poor product-market fit and wrong market timing, reveal why the capital dried up in the first place: See the full breakdown of why startups fail here.   Hot: High-touch voice AI   Enterprise voice AI platforms are shifting focus from developer-led models to high-touch enterprise deployments.   According to CB Insights hiring data, leading platforms like ElevenLabs, Bland AI, and Deepgram are building out dedicated implementation teams of forward-deployed engineers, solutions architects, and deployment strategists. Healthcare, financial services, quick-service restaurants, and the public sector top the target list as these verticals demand complex integrations and high reliability that self-serve models can't deliver.   Get the full breakdown in our recent report on this year’s AI agent predictions.   Not: Healthcare startup durability   Healthcare & biotech accounts for more startup shutdowns since 2023 than any other sector, ahead of fintech (13.2%) and food & agriculture (12.5%). The industry also destroyed the most capital: $5.1B, reflecting the capital intensity of clinical-stage drug development.   For example, Areteia Therapeutics raised $425M but shut down after its respiratory therapeutics for asthma didn’t meet expectations in clinical trials.  Check out our full analysis of startup post-mortems here.   The +1 Source: u/misteregamer1 via Reddit    Scale fails women. Y-axis needs to grow up.      I love you.   Anand @asanwal  Co-Founder & Exec Chair   P.S. Want to know what the future of robotics holds? Register for our briefing here. Get started with CB Insights Start your free trial CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.  Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here Copyright © 2025 CB Insights, All rights reserved. 498 7th Avenue, NY, CB Insights, New York,10018 About Us \| Update Preferences \| Research \| Newsletter |
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