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The 2010s were a decade of massive transformation for the tech industry. Advances in technology brought nearly every industry online, and the proliferation of mobile devices and social media fundamentally changed the way consumers and businesses interact.
The 2010s were also a bloodbath for companies that couldn't keep up with seismic technological changes.
Dozens of high-profile companies went under in the past decade. While some were doomed by their reliance on outdated tech, others were new startups that raised millions before burning out.
These tech and media companies are now synonymous with obsolescence, but their decline and failure can provide valuable lessons about how fast industries are changing and what happens to entities that can't keep up.
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Here are 13 of the most notable tech companies to go under in the past decade.
Even though Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy nearly a decade ago, there's one privately-owned Blockbuster franchise store left in the world. Read more about it here.
The solar power startup was the first to receive a clean energy loan guarantee from the federal government in 2005. It shuttered in 2011, just five months after a visit from President Barack Obama.
Compaq, once one of the largest PC makers in America, dwindled throughout the 2000s. After being purchased by Hewlett Packard for $25 billion in 2002, the brand name was ultimately retired by HP in 2013.
Founded six years before Facebook, Friends Reunited was an early social media platform that was primarily popular in the UK before fading out of relevance.
This early smartwatch began by raising $10.3 million on Kickstarter, making it the most successful Kickstarter campaign ever at the time. Its owner turned down offers to sell the company for $740 million in 2015, but struggled to compete with competitors like the Apple Watch and ultimately sold out to FitBit for less than $40 million in 2016.
Vertu initially branded itself as a luxury cell phone maker, with phones priced at $6,000 in 2015. The company struggled to compete with major smartphone makers and collapsed in 2017.
Theranos crumbled under the weight of the high expectations it set for itself when scientists and journalists poked holes in the company's promises to run blood tests on a single drop of blood. Here's everything that happened leading up to Theranos's downfall.
The once-popular web browsing tool was acquired by eBay in 2007, spun back out two years later, and finally acquired by Mix, which shut it down in 2018. It wasn't the end of the road for StumbleUpon cofounder Garrett Camp however — he founded Uber in 2009.
The electric motorcycle maker raised money from investors including Tesla co-founders Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard, but was unable to maintain its momentum.
