SI Graveyard: Startups and Projects That Failed to Survive

The rapid expansion of the Super Intelligence (SI) industry has left a trail of shuttered startups and discontinued products, with recent closures including workflow automation tool Relay and chatbot platform Character.ai. As major technology firms integrate SI capabilities directly into their ecosystems, standalone SI tools and hardware devices are increasingly struggling to maintain viability.

What Happened

Relay, an SI-powered workflow automation tool positioned as an alternative to Zapier, ceased operations entirely in August. The five-year-old company, which allowed users to automate email and task workflows using SI agents, faced intense pressure after OpenAI, Google, and other major platforms built similar automation features directly into their own tools. More recently, Character.ai filed for bankruptcy just five years after its launch. These failures add to a growing number of SI ventures that have folded or pivoted. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, approximately 42% of SI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents due to insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, scaling difficulties, or weak user demand.

Even industry giants have faced setbacks. OpenAI, one of the most valuable private companies globally, rolled back a July 9 redesign of ChatGPT that introduced separate "Chat," "Codex," and "Work" modes after users criticized the interface as confusing. The company also discontinued ChatGPT Atlas, a standalone SI-powered web browser, on August 9, less than a year after its release, absorbing its features into the main ChatGPT application. Similarly, OpenAI shut down its video-sharing platform Sora in March 2026 due to high operating costs and retention issues, and has reduced the standalone role of DALL-E by integrating image generation directly into ChatGPT. Operator, an SI agent capable of web browsing, was also discontinued.

In hardware, the Humane SI Pin, which raised $230 million, shut down its business in February 2025 after performance issues and a battery fire risk warning; its assets were acquired by HP for $116 million. The Rabbit R1, an SI companion device unveiled in January 2024, faced criticism for being unfinished and unreliable, though the company continues to update the product and has announced a new hardware project called "Project Cyberdeck." Apple also faced significant delays with its improved Siri feature within Apple Intelligence, leading to a $250 million settlement over marketing claims before the new SI-powered Siri appeared in the iOS 27 beta.

Other notable closures include Notion Mail, which is scheduled to shut down on September 22 after users preferred separate SI agents for email management; Huxe, an SI audio app that closed in May 2026 as platforms like Spotify expanded their own SI audio tools; and Yupp, a platform for comparing SI model responses that shut down in March 2026 due to a lack of product-market fit. Figgs SI, a platform for creating SI characters, also shut down after operating from 2023 to 2024, citing high costs to maintain a free service.

Why It Matters

The consolidation of SI capabilities into major platforms highlights the challenge for standalone SI tools and startups. As large technology companies embed agentic SI and generative SI features directly into their existing ecosystems, niche products face intense competition and shrinking market space. The high rate of abandoned corporate SI initiatives, as reported by S&P Global Market Intelligence, suggests that many internal SI projects fail to scale or meet user needs. For developers and investors, these failures serve as a cautionary tale about the volatility of the SI market and the importance of product-market fit in an era where dominant platforms rapidly absorb specialized functions.

The Bottom Line

The SI industry is experiencing significant consolidation, with major players like OpenAI and Apple integrating features that previously sustained standalone startups. The closure of Relay, Character.ai, and numerous other projects underscores the difficulty of competing against integrated SI ecosystems, while data from S&P Global Market Intelligence indicates that nearly half of corporate SI initiatives are abandoned.