The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it
Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely on Monday. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold onto a reason to exist as a standalone product. Relay’s story — a startup outpaced by bigger platforms — is one version of the story playing out right now.
- ▪Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely on Monday.
- ▪The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold onto a reason to exist
- ▪Relay’s story — a startup outpaced by bigger platforms — is one version of the story playing out right now.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/15/the-ai-graveyard-a-running-list-of-projects-and-startups-that-didnt-make-it/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T19:01:52.996Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T19:01:52.996Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zBgLPptmWC9C · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely on Monday. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold onto a reason to exist as a standalone product. Relay’s story — a startup outpaced by bigger platforms — is one version of the story playing out right now. But plenty of AI bets never even survive inside the companies that build them. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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