RootData: The mortality rate of VC-supported projects exceeds 20.8%, with the highest reaching 61%

2025-06-05 23:25:45

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The investment projects of VCs such as Placeholder, KR1, Lightspeed Venture, and ParaFi Capital have the lowest mortality rate; while those of Dutch Crypto Investors, OIG Capital, Basics Capital, and LK Venture have the highest mortality rate.

Author: RootData

VC projects have hit the bottom of the crypto market in the past year or two, which has sparked much attention and discussion. Yesterday, several media outlets cited a report from Bitcoin.com stating that nearly 45% of VC-backed crypto projects have ceased operations, which is quite a striking number, but how accurate is it? What data supports this? This has raised many questions. As the platform with the richest data on crypto market investment and financing, RootData has also derived and analyzed this data.

One of the main data characteristics of the platform is that RootData marks the pages of projects that have ceased operations prominently as "Ceased Operations." This is primarily determined through official announcements from the projects and the status of their official websites/Twitter accounts. For example, if the official Twitter account or other social media has not been updated for more than six months, or if both the official Twitter and website are inaccessible, we will mark it as ceased operations. In terms of proportion, only about 20% of projects officially announce that their company is no longer operating or that their product is no longer maintained; most projects are judged based on their social media status.

Since most new projects require a certain observation period, to ensure the representativeness and reliability of the data sample, RootData only counts projects established before 2024. The status of these projects after long-term operation better represents the investment performance of VCs.

According to RootData statistics, there are a total of 4,521 projects that disclosed financing round information before January 2024, of which 940 have been marked as ceased operations, resulting in a mortality rate of 20.8%.

However, it is worth noting that besides the projects marked as ceased operations, there are also a considerable number of projects that, although still occasionally update their social media, have long only been retweeting industry news without any substantial product progress, and their FDV has long been below $1 million. These types of projects account for at least 10%.

In the following sections, RootData specifically statistics the mortality rate of well-known VC investment projects, focusing on VCs that have invested in more than 50 projects.

Mortality Rate of Investment Projects by Well-Known VCs

Based on the ranking of cumulative investment numbers, this chart presents the mortality rate of investment projects from 30 well-known VCs, among which GBV Capital, Spark Digital Capital, HTX Ventures, and LD Capital all exceed 30%, while only YZi Labs is below 10%.

The 30 VCs with the Lowest Investment Project Mortality Rates

According to statistics, the five VCs with the lowest investment project mortality rates are Placeholder, KR1, Lightspeed Venture, ParaFi Capital, Gnosis VC, YZi Labs, Wintermute, ConsenSys Mesh, Tiger Global, and CoinFund, all with mortality rates not exceeding 11%.

The 30 VCs with the Highest Investment Project Mortality Rates

According to statistics, the ten VCs with the highest investment project mortality rates are Dutch Crypto Investors, OIG Capital, Basics Capital, LK Venture, GBV Capital, Momentum 6, EVG, X21 Digital, Magnus Capital, and Kyros Ventures, all with mortality rates exceeding 38%.