FTX
Stole $8B in customer funds to gamble on shitcoins
YC's poster child for effective altruism turned out to be effectively stealing. Built a crypto exchange, funneled $8 billion in customer deposits to his hedge fund Alameda Research while sleeping on a beanbag in a Bahamas penthouse. Sentenced to 25 years. YC quietly scrubbed him from their website.
IRL
95% of users were bots. Raised $170M on the lie.
Autopsy Report:
Pitched as Gen Z's social app for real-life events. Claimed 20M users. SEC investigation revealed 95% of those users were automated bots the company created itself . Board shut it down in 2023. Shafi charged with securities fraud. The 'IRL' app was anything but.
Cruise
Robotaxis that dragged pedestrians and covered it up
Autopsy Report:
GM bought Cruise for $1B, then poured in $10B more. Their self-driving cars dragged a pedestrian 20 feet and executives initially withheld the footage from regulators . California pulled their license. GM wrote off the entire investment. The future of autonomous driving became a $10B bonfire.
ScaleFactor
AI bookkeeping that was actually humans in a back room
Autopsy Report:
Raised $100M claiming AI-powered bookkeeping. In reality, the 'AI' was a room full of offshore accountants manually doing the work . Customers reported tax filing errors and missing transactions. Quietly shut down in 2020 during COVID, blaming the pandemic.
Atrium
YC's golden boy burned $75M trying to disrupt lawyers
Autopsy Report:
Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and YC royalty, raised $75M to build an AI-powered law firm. Turns out law is hard and AI couldn't replace lawyers . Pivoted three times, laid off all attorneys, then shut down entirely. The legal industry remained undisrupted.
Katerra
Burned $2B trying to move fast and break buildings
Autopsy Report:
Raised $2B to 'disrupt construction' with a tech approach. Instead, they hemorrhaged cash on factories they couldn't fill and projects they couldn't finish . Filed for bankruptcy in 2021 with $1.6B in debt. SoftBank lost over $1B. Turns out buildings are harder than apps.
Homejoy
Uber for house cleaning. Workers fought back.
Autopsy Report:
YC darling that raised $40M to be the 'Uber for home cleaning.' Growth looked great because they were subsidizing every cleaning at a loss to juice the metrics . Hit with worker misclassification lawsuits. Shut down in 2015. Adora went on to become a YC partner. Failing up, YC style.
Flexport
CEO fired, rehired, then fired everyone else
Autopsy Report:
Raised $2.3B to digitize freight forwarding. Then the governance circus began: the board replaced Ryan Petersen with a former Amazon exec, who lasted 6 months before Petersen staged a comeback coup . Post-coup, Petersen laid off 20% of the company and pivoted strategy. Valuation cratered from $8B. The boxes keep moving, but nobody knows where this ship is headed.
WeWork
Community-adjusted EBITDA. Filed for bankruptcy.
Autopsy Report:
Not technically YC, but Adam Neumann got $350M from the YC Continuity Fund. The company that invented 'community-adjusted EBITDA' and spent $13 on every $1 of revenue . IPO collapsed, Neumann ousted, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Then Neumann raised $350M for a new startup. Silicon Valley's memory is 18 months.
Instacart
Lost 75% of its peak valuation. Gig workers still waiting.
Autopsy Report:
The poster child of pandemic-era hype. Peaked at $39B valuation during COVID lockdowns, then IPO'd at a $10B valuation — a 75% haircut from peak . Still relies on gig workers with no benefits. Mehta cashed out $1.1B. The groceries got delivered; the returns did not.
Took 20 years to IPO. Content moderation is a suggestion.
Autopsy Report:
YC's second-ever startup. Took 19 years to go public. Along the way, hosted jailbait subreddits for years, enabled election interference, and CEO Steve Huffman secretly edited user comments in the database . IPO'd in 2024 at $6.4B. The moderators who kept the site running? They work for free.
Delve
Fake compliance as a service. 493+ fabricated audit reports.
Autopsy Report:
Claimed to automate SOC 2 and ISO compliance auditing with AI. Whistleblower revealed the platform auto-generated identical passing audit reports with keyboard-mashed test data before clients even uploaded anything . CEO was caught on tape asking an auditor 'does your firm actually look at our platform?' Insight Partners scrubbed their $32M investment blog post. Also accused of taking an open source tool and passing it off as proprietary.
PearAI
Forked an open-source code editor, slapped their name on it, called it a startup.
Autopsy Report:
On Day 1 of YC Demo Day, the internet noticed that PearAI had forked Continue.dev's open source code editor, mass-replaced all 'Continue' references with 'PearAI', and slapped on a fake license written by ChatGPT . The 'Pear Enterprise License' became a meme. YC had to publish a blog post 'correcting the record.' Founders apologized and pivoted. The license was generated by AI. The irony was not lost.
Quibi
Burned $1.75B on shows nobody watched on phones
Autopsy Report:
Not YC-backed but a spiritual sibling. Raised $1.75B for 'quick bites' of mobile video. Launched during COVID when everyone was home with TVs and nobody wanted to watch premium content on a phone they couldn't even screenshot . Shut down after 6 months. $1.75B for a 6-month experiment. At least they had Turnstile.
Rippling
YC's HR darling caught in a spy thriller with Deel
Autopsy Report:
Parker Conrad's redemption arc after Zenefits hit a plot twist when Rippling sued competitor Deel for planting an undercover spy inside Rippling who was paid €5,000/month by Deel's CEO to steal trade secrets . The DOJ opened a criminal investigation. Deel allegedly ran the same playbook at crypto HR startup Toku. YC uses Rippling for their own HR — awkward.
End of Directory. More corpses added daily.
Satirical project. Not affiliated with Y Combinator. All information from public records.