25 Most Valuable Startups That Failed This Year

I think that it's particularly difficult to write about why a company failed. Theranos is an extreme example, because the root cause of the company's failure is pretty clear and because there's a lot of mindshare and commentary about their issues. For many other companies, failure is a culmination of many different issues, many of which are likely to be private. As a result, unless someone with good internal insight into the failure of the company makes a public post, a la Shyp founder Kevin [1], there likely isn't one comprehensive single cause of failure, and any speculation would likely be doing a disservice to the company.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-d...

Probably because their product was toy-grade, slow and with inaccurate movements, not meeting the demands for the industry. It did look photogenic though.

Startup equity rounds are typically disclosed publicly, but the valuations might not be (for a variety of reasons, one of which is that valuations can be used as a proxy for the health of the company, which the company may want to keep private). Pitchbook likely only uses publicly known/verified valuations, which may not reflect the actual valuation at the latest round of fundraising.

Either they did late stage down rounds, or the data is just wrong.