How many startups fail in the first year
Published 9 November 2026
Crunchbase lists 8,249 startups founded in 2025 that have raised at least one round. It marks 9 of them closed. That is 0.1%, which seemed far too low to us.
So we checked the websites instead. Of a random 800 of these companies, 60 (7.5%) have a website that is gone: the domain no longer resolves, the server does not answer, the home page returns 404, or the domain is parked, a placeholder or a casino site now. These companies are 10 to 22 months old, and every one of them raised money. Across all 7,390 with a website that comes to about 550 dead sites, against 9 closures on Crunchbase.
Dead websites by founding year
Startups with at least one round on Crunchbase and a website on file. Random sample per founding year, checked on 9 November 2026. Source: FundingWatcher, November 2026.
| Founded | Funded startups | Marked closed on Crunchbase | Websites checked | Dead | Dead (95% interval) | Could not tell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 8,249 | 9 (0.1%) | 800 | 60 (7.5%) | 5.9% to 9.5% | 59 |
| 2024 | 11,460 | 42 (0.4%) | 500 | 46 (9.2%) | 7.0% to 12.1% | 61 |
| 2023 | 13,396 | 79 (0.6%) | 500 | 73 (14.6%) | 11.8% to 18.0% | 57 |
The dead share roughly doubles between the 2025 and the 2023 class, from 7.5% to 14.6%. Crunchbase closures rise too, but stay under 1% in every year.
How the 60 dead sites of the 2025 class died
| Reason | Sites |
|---|---|
| Domain no longer resolves | 26 |
| Home page returns 404 | 16 |
| Server does not answer | 10 |
| Placeholder page | 4 |
| Parked or for sale | 2 |
| Casino or gambling site now | 2 |
Limits
A dead website is a lower bound for a dead company. A startup can stop working and leave its site up for years; the 2015 to 2017 seed class shows that pattern at scale in Seed startups listed as active. And every company here raised at least one round, mostly pre-seed (300 of the 800) and seed (303), so the rate for all new companies, funded or not, is probably higher. For the longer view, see the startup failure rate.
How we counted
We took every company in our Crunchbase file (1.72 million records) with at least one dated round and a founding date in 2023, 2024 or 2025, and drew a random sample per year from those with a website on file. Each home page was fetched once through rotating proxies, with up to three tries. A site counts as dead when its domain does not resolve, the connection fails, the home page returns 404 or 410, or the page is parked, for sale, a hosting placeholder, empty or a gambling site. A 403, a 429, a 5xx error, a timeout or a redirect to a different domain counts as "could not tell"; the dead share above uses all checked sites as the base, so it does not count those as dead.
- website-check.csv, all 1,800 checked sites with founding date, last round type, result and reason.