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Daniyal Khatri
Daniyal Khatri

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I Catalogued 55 Dead AI Tools. $4.24 Billion Is Buried There.

#discuss #startup #ai #opensource

Every week a new AI tool launches. Nobody talks about the ones that die.

So I started keeping records. Every dead AI tool I could verify — the date it died, the cause of death, how much money it raised, and what replaced it. The result is an open-source graveyard: 55 verified dead AI tools, and $4.24 billion in funding buried with them.

The rule from day one: no source, no tombstone. Every death in the dataset is backed by the company's own announcement or real reporting. If I could not prove a tool died, it did not get a grave.

The Biggest Graves

Olive — raised $902M. Healthcare automation, valued at $4 billion at its peak. Wound down in 2023 and sold off in pieces.

Babylon Health — raised $735M. Worth $4.2 billion at its SPAC peak. Bankrupt two years later.

Forward Health — raised $650M. Built doctor-in-a-box kiosks. Shut them down overnight in November 2024. Patients found out their visits were cancelled.

Builder.ai — raised $450M. Promised apps "like ordering pizza." Collapsed into insolvency in 2025.

Humane AI Pin — raised $230M. The pin that was going to replace your phone. HP bought the pieces, and on February 28, 2025, every pin stopped working. Owners were left holding a $699 brick.

And Sora — OpenAI's video app, reportedly burning around a million dollars a day, gone less than a year after launch. Even OpenAI buries its dead.

What the Graves Tell Us

I counted the patterns, because the patterns are the useful part:

  • The die-off is accelerating. Deaths by year in the dataset: 2022 → 1, 2023 → 6, 2024 → 12, 2025 → 18, 2026 → 18. Two out of every three tools in the graveyard died in the last two years.
  • AI tools die young. The average lifespan is 4.9 years. 21 of the 55 were dead within three years. Only 5 made it past ten.
  • Being bought is not a happy ending. 16 of the 55 were acquired and then killed. 31 shut down outright. 8 were dropped when their company pivoted.
  • The team-hire is a death sentence. PlayHT's team went to Meta. Humanloop's went to Anthropic. Supermaven's went to Cursor. Hour One's went to Wix. In every case, the product was shut down soon after. The users were never part of the deal.
  • Money does not save you. The typical funded startup in the graveyard raised about $22 million. It still died before turning five.

7 Warning Signs Your AI Tool Is About to Die

Every sign below already happened to at least one tool in the dataset:

  1. A big company hires the team. Export your data the same week.
  2. The owner ships its own replacement. Cortana died when Copilot arrived. Google Assistant died when Gemini took over.
  3. An "exciting new chapter" acquisition post. It always says nothing will change for users. Then the shutdown email arrives.
  4. It is free, popular, and expensive to run. Figgs AI passed a million users and still closed — the free service cost too much to run.
  5. There is no export button. PlayHT deleted every user's voice clones with no way to download them. If your work cannot leave, your work dies with the tool.
  6. The hardware needs their servers. Servers off means the Humane Pin is a brick and Moxie robots stop talking.
  7. The updates quietly stop. No changelog, slow support, then the shutdown post. Silence is a symptom.

Not Dead Yet

The graveyard also has an Intensive Care ward — tools with announced death dates that still work today, so they do not get a tombstone. There are 8 patients right now. Tap Bio closes on October 31. remove.bg sunsets on December 1. Arc browser shuts down on December 22.

Character.AI is the most famous patient: it filed for Chapter 11 this month, but the platform is still running. Bankrupt is not dead. It stays out of the ground until it actually closes — that distinction is the whole point of this project.

The Dataset Is Open

The full graveyard is a free dataset (JSON + CSV): name, category, born year, death date, money raised, cause of death, source link, and the free alternative that survived each tool. Use it in your own projects.

If I missed a death, pull requests are open — one tool per PR, and the source link is not optional.

The repo: https://github.com/Daniyal-Khatri/ai-tools-graveyard

I build SaaSListy, a directory of AI tools and workflows, which means I check AI tools by hand for a living. This graveyard is the other side of that job: somebody should keep the records of the ones that did not make it.

Export your data while you still can.

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