19 failed startups in Asia in 2015 and lessons learned

2015 was a hot year for some startups in Asia. Venture capital flowed into China, India and South Korea in previously unheard of amounts. Southeast Asia saw a record exit with iProperty Group’s US $534 million acquisition.

Yet raising gargantuan rounds of financing is no guarantee for future success, and it’s in the risky nature of entrepreneurship that some companies emerge as winners while others bite the dust.

Here are 19 startups from Asia that were forced to shut down this year.

We clustered them by country and in no particular order. These 19 are by no means the only ones to cease operations in 2015. We picked them because we learned something from their story.

(Update March 21, 2016: This article originally mentioned 20 failed startups. We have removed China-based startup Melotic from this list. The startup’s product manager Weston Lim reached out saying that it shut down its digital assets exchange service but pivoted to a new product, an international money transfer application called Kleering.  Melotic’s core team and the investors are still on board.)

China

1. eXiche

In 2015, China saw the closure of not just one, but seven online-to-offline car wash services. You read that right: in a niche as specific as on-demand car washing, multiple players were competing for the lead. That’s how diversified the Chinese startup ecosystem is.

It looks like one company, Guagua Xiche, has emerged as the winner, for now. A company called eXiche was perhaps the most spectacular failure out of the lot. It raised a series A round worth US$20 million in March and discontinued its service by October. Its landing page claims it’s restructuring and not dead.

In the heat of the competition, it looks like many of these car washing services were burning money offering cheap promotions to do something that’s already cheap. It wasn’t sustainable.

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India

2. DoneByNone (Netcraft Retail Solutions)

Despite it being an overall successful year for ecommerce in India, some startups could not survive. Among them is Gurgaon-based web-only women’s fashion brand DoneByNone. It reportedly had problems with customer satisfaction in late 2014, then one of its co-founders jumped ship. By early 2015, the website was no longer available.

3. Lumos

Lumos was a “smart home” startup founded by a team of first-time entrepreneurs straight out of college. Building a hardware startup was a lot harder than they had expected. “We had underestimated the work that goes into making a market-ready hardware product. We had overestimated the demand and utility of our product,” the co-founders write in a long blog post. The team had the grace to document their decision making process and subsequent demise with much detail, and it’s a great read for those who consider building a hardware product.

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Indonesia

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Israel

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Singapore

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Vietnam