This week Explorium's founders, Omer Har and Or Tamir, announced the company is closing, nearly nine years after they founded it. Explorium, founded in 2017, raised more than $127 million, including a $75 million round led by Insight Partners in 2021 at the peak of the funding wave. It built tools that help companies find and enrich external data to improve AI models. According to reports, it spent recent years trying to adapt its products to changes in the AI market, but it was not enough. 'Growth continued into the last year,' the founders wrote, 'but in the end it was not enough.'
The irony is clear. Explorium worked on data for AI years before ChatGPT made the field the talk of the town. Just when the market exploded, the company could not find its place in it. It is not a one-off, and it is worth understanding why it happens.
Lesson one: being early can be as dangerous as being late. Companies that built AI tools in the 'before' era built them for a world in which every company trains its own model and looks for data to improve it. Large language models changed that: many companies simply use ready-made models from OpenAI, Google or Anthropic and do not need the same tools. When the problem a product solves changes, even a good product can become less relevant.
Lesson two: big money at the peak can become a burden. A company that raised at a high valuation in 2021 has to grow very fast to justify it in the next round. When the market cools, it is hard to raise again without cutting the valuation, and investors are not always willing. Many Israeli companies that raised at the peak are in a similar position today, even if they do not make headlines.
Lesson three: speed of adaptation is the most important advantage. In an era when technology changes every few months, the companies that succeed are those willing to change direction fast, sometimes even abandoning a product that worked. Still, remember: a startup closing is part of the model. Many employees and founders of closed companies go on to build the next successful ones, with the experience they gained.
