Four Years On, 38% of YC's 2020-2022 Martech Startups Are Gone or Acquired. 12 of the Dead Still Have a Website.

By Jonah Beckett, Founder-Led Growth & Revenue. Last updated: 2026-08-16

Every martech landscape graphic gets bigger every year. Nobody publishes the other chart: how many of last year's logos are still companies. We built a small one from a corpus somebody else named.

How was the cohort chosen, and why YC?

Our plan named the chiefmartec landscape as the corpus, and we abandoned it for a reason worth stating: it lists thousands of names without domains, which makes any mortality check depend on guessing which domain belongs to which name. We wanted a corpus that was public, fixed, named by a third party, and carried both a domain and a status the namer maintains.

Y Combinator's company directory does all four. We took the public dataset on 2026-08-16, filtered to B2B companies in the Marketing or Sales sub-industry from the six batches Winter 2020 through Summer 2022, and got 94 companies. YC marks each Active, Acquired or Inactive. That is the startup end of the martech stack, four to six years after funding, which is roughly the age at which a tool either becomes infrastructure or becomes a redirect.

Then we did what YC's status field cannot: fetched every website and compared what it says now with what the company said it did when funded.

How many are still going?

By sub-industry, sales tools had the harder time: 12 of 44 are inactive (27%) and 7 acquired, against 8 of 50 marketing tools inactive (16%) and 9 acquired. By batch there is no clean trend, though Winter 2022's 21 companies already show 5 inactive and no acquisitions, which is a lot of dying and no exits for a batch under five years old.

Thirty-eight percent gone or absorbed is the clean number. It is also the flattering one.

What does the website say that the status field does not?

Fetching the sites moved companies in both directions.

Of the 58 marked active, three have no working site: Salesform and Sentiyen do not respond, and Popsy's Framer site returns "Site Not Found." Three redirect somewhere else: Rehook.ai to clevertap.com, Banabo to strinkl.com, Instant Labs to instant.ai. Rethoric's homepage title is "Home - YC," a template placeholder. And at least three still-active companies have pivoted out of marketing or sales altogether by their own description: Kenobi went from landing-page personalization to design systems, Wolfia from sales question-answering to security questionnaires, Superbar from "Sales AI for your website" to a scrolling-experience product. We name those three because pivot is a judgment call and readers should be able to disagree.

Of the 20 marked inactive, only 7 are dark. Twelve still serve a live homepage. Laserfocus still says "Make Salesforce easy to use." Demo Gorilla still offers "Presenter Notes for live SaaS demos." ngrow.ai is still "an AI-driven Customer Engagement Platform." CustomerOS still promises to "uncover hidden pipeline." FirstQuadrant still helps you "maximize B2B sales with human-centered AI." None of these companies, per YC, exists.

Why do dead tools stay on the lists?

Because of those twelve. A "best sales tools" article that was accurate in 2023 links to a homepage that still loads, still has a title, still describes the product, and a reader, or an answer engine, has no signal on that page that the company behind it stopped operating. Our LinkedIn automation market map hit exactly this: Scrab.in's homepage still advertises 500 invitations a day while its own pricing page says the tool is discontinued. Our self-citing listicle audit found vendor lists rarely carry dates or disclosures; they also rarely carry a check on whether the entries are alive.

For a buyer, the practical rule is that a homepage is not a pulse. A public changelog with a recent date is. So is a status page, a pricing page that resolves, or a support inbox that answers. Twelve of these twenty would fail all of those and pass the homepage test.

What is the honest mortality number?

It depends on the definition, so here is the band. Inactive plus acquired: 36 of 94, or 38%, no longer the independent company that was funded. Add active companies whose original domain no longer serves them (three dead, three redirected, one placeholder): 43 of 94, or 46%. Add the three hand-judged pivots: 46 of 94, or 49%, no longer doing the marketing or sales thing they raised money to do.

Two smaller snapshots from this research line point the same way. Of 30 named LinkedIn automation tools we crawled on one day, six were dead, discontinued or pivoted and three had rebranded. Of 56 martech vendors in our main corpus, Shield had shut down and Clearbit had been absorbed by HubSpot between our list being drawn up and the first fetch.

Whichever end of the band you take, a marketing stack assembled from four-year-old recommendations has roughly two-fifths to one-half of its entries pointing at something other than what the recommendation described.

What are the limits of this study?

The corpus is YC-backed startups, which is the young, venture-funded end of martech and says nothing directly about established vendors. YC's sub-industry taxonomy is imperfect: Oda (home design), HOKALI (after-school activities) and Taiv (venue TV) sit in Marketing/Sales and are kept rather than hand-removed, which makes the mortality figures slightly conservative. YC's status field is maintained by YC and can lag; the site checks exist to catch that and did. Sites were fetched once on 2026-08-16. Pivot calls are ours, three of them, named above. Every company, batch, status, HTTP result and title is in the data file published alongside this piece.

FAQ

What share of martech startups fail?

Of 94 marketing and sales tools YC funded in 2020-2022, 20 (21%) were inactive and 16 (17%) acquired by August 2026, so 38% no longer exist as the independent company funded. Including dead sites, redirects and pivots among the "active," 46 (49%) are no longer doing what they were funded to do.

Do sales tools or marketing tools fail more often?

Sales tools in this cohort: 12 of 44 inactive (27%). Marketing tools: 8 of 50 (16%).

Do inactive startups take their websites down?

Often not. 12 of the 20 inactive companies in this cohort still serve a live homepage, several still describing the product in the present tense.

Which YC martech startups from 2020-2022 were acquired?

Sixteen, including Phonic, Skio, Warmly, Partnered (now part of Crossbeam), Positional (now Sunbeam), Enable Us, Journey, Mailmodo, Hilos, Laudable and Breadcrumbs.io.

Why use YC's directory instead of a martech landscape map?

Because it is public, fixed, third-party-named, carries a domain for each company and a status field the namer maintains, which makes the study reproducible without guessing domains from names.

Sources

• Y Combinator company directory
• yc-oss public dataset (mirror of the YC directory)
• Crossbeam (formerly Partnered)
• chiefmartec Marketing Technology Landscape

GTMStack publishes original audits of the AI marketing stack. If you want the next one when it lands, the newsletter is the place to get it.