If you’ve ever seen a powerful startup, you know how motivating it can be for young people. After reading several articles about new original ideas, almost every college student is bound to try and start something on his own, even if it’s not that global. Well, as the 2018th year showed us, not even funded ones deserve a place under the sun. Nine out of ten startups fail tremendously, and moreover, all their funders lose thousands and millions, which they invested into them without a thought.
It doesn’t matter how much you try, sometimes it won’t help even when it is funded so well. What we understood from the list created for our readers – medical and healthcare businesses suffered the most last year. Let’s look at them closer.
1. Theranos
The biggest and loudest fail in this industry is, of course, Theranos, which everyone heard about. About $1 billion spent on nothing, a lot of controversies along with CEO being accused all the time – that’s how this one went down. It had so much potential, being a new way to test blood, producing equipment for therapy and testing in real time, yet, this ship sank quickly when the CEO was fired. It was said that their machines didn’t even work while all their tests were done using other old methods.
2. WINX
It is another therapy startup on our list. It had an interesting idea for development, which didn’t last long with a current startup failure rate. WINX was a business based around a therapy system for patients with sleep apnea that made it easier for them to breathe while sleeping. Even if teenagers in college would think that it’s an incredible idea, it was proved wrong with time.
3. Lantern
One more therapy business, this time focused on the emotional health of patients. Just like you log into your writing service page and buy college research papers, you could log into this app. Here you were able to find some peace and comfort just on your mobile device. It provided its potential users with exercises for establishing good habits. It also helped to cope with depression, anxiety or stress. It was an amazing idea, and a lot of users found this app helpful, but the ones funding this project didn’t seem to notice that more money was needed. As a result, this project was closed due to lack of funding.
4. Rethink Robotics
Rethink Robotics was founded to develop industrial robots that would perform dirty and dangerous work instead of people. It included loading and unloading, testing and inspections, molding and tasks like that just to facilitate jobs in factories. It had an extremely good beginning, with an amazingly innovative idea and got to name itself as a successful startup, yet, the rival company just stole whatever the developers had, and Rethink Robotics closed eventually.
5. Shyp
One of the most helpful developments for customers – a delivering service on call, which was made to pick up and deliver things from and to your doorstep. A special app was made for this platform. You were able to take a picture and choose all the details of your delivery by yourself. The founder of Shyp service had similar problems with other businesses: not enough funding, no time to make everything properly and not enough experience as the CEO.
6. Caresync
Designed for those who suffer from chronic diseases, Caresync was the one to manage and collect all your healthcare data, which were organized for your own good. The doctors as well as hospitals that helped you were able to share and access information about your state of health, which made it a lot easier for short-term care providers. With no apparent funding and a lot of investors trying to get the profit for themselves, Caresync had to apologize to their old and new users, making a decision to close their app.
7. Videology
Videology was an advertisement startup, which was designed to make advertising addressable and let it glide effortlessly through the TV along with other digital services. Even though this business had a lot of stable funders, it didn’t get to see the best of its digital and data-driven advertising. This company didn’t have enough time, money and resources to help and transform the TV services.
8. DataTorrent
The last place on our list got the same outcome. DataTorrent just didn’t get enough of monetization to keep going, even though the idea behind it was really nice. DataTorrent was made for companies that wanted to gain profit from their data. It was a stream processing platform that could analyze all the data coming out in real time and make it easier for companies to focus on real problems and their valuable customers.