In 2024, Indian startups faced a reckoning. Amid the fanfare of six new unicorns and a thaw in the funding winter, a sobering reality played out – numerous startups shut shop across various sectors. From edtech to fintech, several ventures fell by the wayside, citing reasons ranging from funding droughts to unsustainable business models.
As the year closes, let’s take a look at the startups that didn’t survive 2024.
Kenko Health
Insurtech startup Kenko Health shut its operations in August after running out of funds. Cofounder Aniruddha Sen told employees that the company was unable to infuse equity capital in time due to various internal reasons. The startup hadn’t paid its staff salaries for months and had laid off 20% of its workforce in 2023.
The company, backed by Peak XV Partners and Orios Venture Partners, has been taken to the National Company Law Tribunal by a debt fund that had given it a loan, Sen said.
Koo
Koo, the homegrown social media platform which posed as a rival to Twitter, shut down in July due to failed partnership talks and high technology costs. Founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this on networking platform LinkedIn, citing the challenges of keeping a social media app running without sufficient funding.
Toplyne
Bengaluru-based Toplyne, a sales software provider for product-led companies, wound down its operations in October due to its inability to achieve product-market fit. The Tiger Global-backed company said it will return capital to its investors.
“After 3.5 years of building Toplyne, we’ve made the tough decision to wind down operations and return capital to our investors. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t reach the scale or product-market fit we aimed for,” cofounder Ruchin Kulkarni said in a post on X.
My Tirth India
Spiritual tech startup My Tirth India closed shop in August due to a shortage of funds. The Mumbai-based company was a pilgrimage and darshan site offering a one-stop portal to travel around India’s religious destinations.
Founder and CEO Indraneel Dasgupta attributed the failure of the company to a funding shortage following the demise of its principal shareholder and mentor Subrata Roy, the founder of Sahara India Pariwar.
Bluelearn
Elevation Capital-backed upskilling and job finding platform Bluelearn shut down operations in July and said it will return 70% of the capital to its investors. The edtech company had raised $4 million in funding from venture capital firms like 100x VC, Titan Capital, Elevation Capital and Lightspeed along with angel investors like Meesho founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Pixxel founder Awais Ahmed, among others.
Stoa
Zerodha cofounder Nithin Kamath backed-edtech firm Stoa School shut down in November, without disclosing reasons. The edtech firm founded in October 2020 by Kulkarni and Raj Kunkolienkar, offered a six-month MBA programme, competing with the likes of Masters’ Union and Mesa School of Business.
