禁漫天堂

More than 90% of startups fail, but what happens after a company shuts down is far less understood, and often far more painful than it needs to be.

was founded in 2023 on the idea that winding down a startup shouldn鈥檛 be chaotic, opaque or a total loss for founders and investors. Since then, it raised just over $20 million from investors including,,, and

Founder and CEO came up with the concept while building his previous company, after a board member asked him to produce a 鈥渟hutdown analysis.鈥� The process proved so complex and time-consuming that it sparked the idea for a software platform to automate and streamline company closures.

Three years later, Los Angeles-based SimpleClosure is expanding that vision with the launch of Asset Hub, a marketplace designed to help founders recover value from what they鈥檝e built 鈥� from source code and operational data to domain names and equipment 鈥� rather than letting those assets disappear in the shutdown process.

禁漫天堂 News spoke with Yona via email about the new product, the rise in startup shutdowns, and how attitudes around failure are beginning to shift.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

禁漫天堂 News: Are we seeing more shutdowns than in the past?

Yona: We’ve seen strong year-over-year growth in startup shutdown activity over the past few years, and that trend has continued into 2026 so far. Based on our data, in Q1 2026 we saw 2.6x more companies close compared to Q1 2025.

Tell us more about the Asset Hub and why you launched it.

This offering was part of our original vision for SimpleClosure and has continued to be reinforced by feedback from the thousands of founders we have worked with over the past three years.

In our early days, we kept hearing the same thing: Selling off assets was one of the most frustrating and opaque parts of winding down. Companies had spent years building real things: source code, internal tools, operational data, but when it came time to shut down, there was no straightforward way to find buyers or capture any of that value. It just evaporated.

We’re launching the Asset Hub with two initial offerings: Source Code and Workplace Data (beta), but it doesn’t stop there. We’re talking about physical equipment like laptops, domain names, IP 鈥� all the things a company accumulates over its lifetime that still hold value but often get written off or forgotten during the chaos of a shutdown.

SimpleClosure has always been about making the shutdown process more efficient, more compliant and less painful. Asset Hub is the natural next step, moving beyond the paperwork and filings to actually help founders walk away with something tangible from the work they put in.

With the industry now actively seeking real-world codebase and workplace data to train the next generation of models and agents, the timing couldn’t be better. What used to be abandoned assets now have a real market, and we’re in a unique position to facilitate that connection on behalf of our customers.

We’re seeing more capital-intensive sectors like biotech and climate tech beginning to use SimpleClosure. How does the dissolution process change when you’re dealing with physical assets and complex IP rather than just code and a cap table?

The underlying dissolution framework is the same. You still need to wind up the company by settling liabilities, handling assets, and distributing any remaining proceeds in the correct priority order.

What changes with capital-intensive industries like biotech or climate tech is the nature of the assets and obligations, which introduces more complexity in a few key areas: Physical assets require real-world disposition. Instead of just transferring code or shutting down software, you’re dealing with lab equipment, inventory or hardware. These need to be inventoried, stored, sold, or disposed of, often with logistics, costs, and timelines involved. We have some liquidation partners who assist in this area.

IP is more complex and often more valuable. Rather than a codebase, you may have patents, filings or licensed technology. That means more formal valuation considerations, potential buyers or licensing opportunities and additional documentation to properly transfer or assign rights.

The process isn’t fundamentally different, but it’s more hands-on, more document-heavy, and requires tighter coordination across legal, financial, and operational workstreams to ensure everything is properly closed out.

As we move into 2026, 鈥渟imple鈥� rule-based automation is being replaced by adaptive AI. How is SimpleClosure moving toward 鈥淐ognitive Partnering鈥� to help founders make nuanced decisions about creditor negotiations rather than just filing paperwork?

At a baseline, dissolution still requires structured, rule-based steps (filings, notices, sequencing). But where founders really need help is in the gray areas, especially around creditor strategy, tradeoffs, and timing.

That’s where cognitive partnering would come in.

Founders often ask questions such as: Am I allowed to settle this vendor at 50%? Can I pay this vendor first? What happens if I don’t respond?

Rather than giving a single answer, we help frame what’s required in terms of creditor priority, where there’s flexibility, and what risks are introduced by each path.

We’re also able to see pattern recognition across hundreds of shutdowns, and are starting to leverage what we’ve seen across many wind-ups, such as where delays create real risk versus just noise and what 鈥済ood鈥� vs. 鈥減roblematic鈥� outcomes look like.

We also keep humans in the loop for judgment calls. We’re not trying to fully automate these decisions 鈥� they’re too nuanced. The goal is that AI surfaces context, options, and risks while humans make the final call.

We’re moving from: 鈥淗ere’s what to file next鈥� to 鈥淗ere’s how to think about this decision, what your options are, and what the consequences look like.鈥�

Is there a future where your platform provides 鈥渉ealth monitoring鈥� tools to help founders recognize months in advance when a pivot or a clean shutdown is their best fiduciary path?

Potentially. It is definitely something that comes up with founders from time to time.

Making the decision to shut down however, is typically based on more than just company health. It is often an emotional decision for the founder that marks the end of a multi-year journey.

We will never push the founder into a dissolution. The decision has to come from them.

Is it accurate that your company has helped return more than $150 million to investors that might have otherwise been trapped in 鈥渮ombie鈥� companies? Do you see a shift in VC sentiment where a 鈥渃lean failure鈥� is now viewed as a more positive signal for a founder’s next raise than a slow, three-year bleed-out?

Yes! That’s accurate, and as of this week we’ve actually helped return over $200 million to stakeholders.

What we’re seeing from both founders and investors is a real shift in mindset. A few years ago, there was more tolerance for companies lingering, trying to figure it out over long periods. Now, there’s a growing recognition that a clean, well-executed shutdown is often the more responsible outcome.

From a founder perspective, running a thoughtful wind-down (prioritizing creditors appropriately, returning remaining capital and closing things out cleanly) demonstrates strong judgment and integrity. That absolutely carries weight in future fundraising conversations.

From the investor side, capital efficiency matters more than ever. Getting capital back, even partially, and seeing that a founder handled a difficult situation responsibly is often viewed more positively than a prolonged burn with no clear path forward.

鈥淐lean failure鈥� is about communication and trust. Investors keep telling us what stresses them out isn’t a company that’s struggling, it’s a founder who goes dark when things get hard. Investors want the hard truth.

They don’t just want to hear from the founder when things are good. They want to hear when they’re stuck, because that’s when they can actually do something like brainstorm a pivot, restructure, raise a bridge round, or explore an exit or soft landing. Shutting down is almost never the first option they reach for. But they can’t help if they don’t know.

I recently chatted with a founder whose investor wants to back them a third time. Their first company exited. The second was a shutdown. By the third, the investor was writing a blank check because they’d seen this founder handle both the highs and the lows out in the open. The founders who handle the downside cleanly are the ones who get the next yes.

So yes, I would say that we’re increasingly seeing that a clean failure is not only more accepted, but in many cases preferred, because it preserves both capital and credibility.

After exited the shutdown space to back you, how has that partnership changed the way cap table data integrates into the dissolution process? Is the goal a 鈥渙ne-click鈥� shutdown?

Carta has been very helpful. We’ve been working closely with them, and it’s been valuable not just for improving the product (cap table side of things) and user experience, but also for strengthening the brand and reputation venture-backed founders expect.

That said, the reality is that cap table data, even when coming from a system like Carta, still requires validation and context. Companies evolve over time, and by the time they’re shutting down, there are often nuances that need to be reconciled. So while integration helps streamline things, it doesn’t eliminate the need for thoughtful review.

On the idea of a one-click shutdown: We think about that a bit differently. There are definitely parts of the process that should feel close to one-click, such as pulling in cap-table data, generating documents and calculating distributions

But a shutdown is the unwinding of everything that went into building a company 鈥� contracts, obligations, stakeholders, and decisions made over years. There are some decisions that can and should be made by the founder themselves such as how to communicate with employees, investors and vendors. That’s not something that can, or should, be reduced to a single action.

You’ve often said that automating shutdowns helps break the taboo of failure. In 2026, are you seeing founders talk about their SimpleClosure experience as openly as they talk about their seed rounds?

We’re definitely seeing a shift. More founders are talking about their SimpleClosure experience in the same breath as their fundraising story, because for many of them, shutting down is part of the story. I can point to any of our customer testimonials to demonstrate that founders are increasingly willing to share their experience.

But I don’t want to overstate it. The stigma hasn’t disappeared. There’s still a version of founder culture where talking about closing your company feels like admitting defeat. What we are seeing is that SimpleClosure gives founders a way to close with their heads held high 鈥� the process is clean, documented and professional, and that changes both how they talk about it afterward and their relationships with investors, employees, vendors and other stakeholders moving forward.

A significant portion of your users are already working on their next company. What is the most common lesson learned you hear from founders who used your platform to close their first venture?

1. A lot of founders say some version of 鈥淚 knew earlier than I acted.鈥� They reflect that they held on just a bit too long, hoping for a turnaround, a fundraise, or a breakthrough. In doing so, they burned additional time, money, and energy that could have been preserved, as well as saving themselves some extra heartbreak. They could have started their next company already.
2. It’s not just your company or your money. You have obligations to vendors, employees, investors. And those obligations don’t go away just because things didn’t work out. The founders who go through a structured wind-down come out with a much clearer understanding of responsibility, and that shows up very differently in how they operate the next time.
3. How much unnecessary complexity founders take on without a downside plan. Debt, grants, multistate operations, vendor contracts 鈥� all of it feels manageable when things are going well. But during a shutdown, that complexity becomes friction and liability quickly. We’ve seen second-time founders are much more intentional in all fronts, from limiting vendors to debating whether to bootstrap for as long as possible. Indeed, these are many of the same lessons I have learned myself over my career as a founder.

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