| Board | Died | Lived | Cause, in one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coqui AI AI Voice Cloning | 2023-12 | 30 mo | Coqui AI (coqui.ai): commercial AI voice synthesis and cloning from the ex-Mozilla TTS team. On the books 2021-06 (approx) to 2023-12 on the roster; the public shutdown notice surfaced 2024-01-03 [FDR]; 30 months; $3.3M raised in a single round [3P, roster]. Cause of death filed as moat-misread: the open-source TTS core and the paid SaaS sold the same capability, and the free one won. Lesson carried forward: an open-source core plus a paid SaaS of the same thing is a contradiction, not a funnel. |
| Dot AI Companions | 2025-10 | 16 mo | Dot (new.computer): AI companion app built by co-founders Sam Whitmore and ex-Apple designer Jason Yuan. Live 2024-06 to 2025-10; 16 months; shutdown reported 2025-09 [3P]. Roughly 24,500 lifetime iOS downloads (Appfigures, no Android version) on the books against public claims of hundreds of thousands. Cause filed as team-collapse — the founding team broke before the product built a moat. Lesson: do not raise, and do not publish numbers, before growth is verified. |
| Cydoc AI Medical EHR | 2025-08 | 88 mo | Cydoc (cydoc.ai): AI-native EHR with automated intake and clinical notes; solo MD-PhD founder; roughly $265K raised from family, friends, and physicians, plus a $50K NC IDEA SEED grant. Live 2018-04 to 2025-08; 88 months — the longest lifespan in this graveyard. Cause filed as platform-dependence: every practice-level EHR integration ($4,000-$6,000 each, against customers paying under $100/month) cost more than the product could ever recoup, per the founder's own postmortem [FDR]. Lesson: before building into someone else's system, cost out a single integration first. |
| AvatarAI AI Headshots | 2025≈ | ~28 mo | AvatarAI (avatarai.me): one of the first AI avatar sites, solo-built by Pieter Levels on Stable Diffusion plus Stripe. Live 2022-11 (approx); a third-party directory marked it inactive 2024-07-25 [3P]; the roster files the death as roughly 2025, about 28 months [INF, medium confidence]. Exact end date UNKNOWN — the domain now redirects to photoai.com [OBS]; traction figures UNKNOWN. Cause filed as founder-consolidation: absorbed into the same founder's PhotoAI rather than beaten by a competitor — avatarai.me returns a 301 to photoai.com/ai-avatars (checked 2026-07-16) [OBS]. Lesson: overlapping sites from one author tend to end in a merge — the weaker slug gets carried into the stronger one. |
Standing rule of this index: a missed roll call — homepage unreachable or parked — starts the public death clock: WATCHLIST on day one, ON TRIAL on day two, and on day three CLEARED or CONFIRMED DEAD. Three consecutive silent days, no exceptions, no early verdicts. No death is confirmed until our own instrument is ruled out first; every false alarm is logged with its true cause, the box versus the move. The four files above predate the instrument — their deaths are anchored to founder statements and third-party reporting, not to the clock.