Mental health startup graveyard: 542 dead companies, seven patterns

An analysis of 542 digital mental health organizations that left the market between 2000 and 2026, coded on up to 18 fields each. The report is published in two editions, English and Russian; both are computed from the same dataset, so every figure and the direction of every finding are identical.

What the data shows. Who pays predicts survival more than anything else in the sample: mortality is 53% where the user pays and 21% where an institution pays. B2C dies 2.2 times more often than B2B. Among apps sold as a one-time purchase, 85% are dead. Published clinical evidence moves the outcome very little (34% against 44%), and a medical co-founder does not move it at all (47% against 47% acquisitions). More than half of all market exits fall between 2021 and 2025, peaking in 2022.

Method. Sources were Crunchbase, CB Insights, Tracxn, public deadpool databases, app store removals, Ahrefs domain data and trade press. Every company was confirmed against at least two independent sources, and rebrands and country editions were merged. The report is generated by a script from the dataset, so no number in it was typed by hand.

Limits. Funding is disclosed for 322 of 542 companies, so money cuts are computed on those only. An acquisition is not counted as a success anywhere: some deals are fire sales out of bankruptcy. Closure dates for products that died quietly are approximate. About 67% of the projects are from the US and the UK. The sample is a graveyard rather than a random cross-section, so shares compare groups against each other and are not a probability of failure.

This is an industry report, not a peer-reviewed publication. It is self-published by Mentalium and should be read as such. The underlying data is open, and every share in the report can be recomputed from it.

The dataset it is computed from is deposited separately under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22125660. The web edition is at mentalium.me.