Between 2015 and today, dozens of robo-advisors launched with venture funding, SEC registrations and beautiful onboarding flows — and quietly died. Not scams, not scandals: registered, well-intentioned firms that ran out of the only thing that matters in asset management, which is assets. This series is their museum, and this page is the map.
Why robo-advisors die
The economics are unforgiving (we do the math in how robo-advisors make money): at a 0.25% fee, revenue is tiny until assets are enormous, while customer-acquisition costs in finance are among the highest anywhere. The typical arc: launch with seed funding → grow to tens of millions in AUM (which sounds impressive and grosses almost nothing) → fail to raise the next round → wind down or sell the book of clients to a larger rival. The SEC paper trail records every step: the Form ADV filings show AUM plateauing, then the withdrawal filing ends the story.
What the graveyard teaches
Three patterns repeat. Registration ≠ viability: nearly every dead platform was properly registered to the end — the registries verify accountability, not business models. Niche narrows the funnel: sustainability-only, women-only, faith-based — mission-driven robos had the most loyal customers and the smallest addressable markets. The clients land softly, mostly: because custody sits at a separate brokerage, wind-downs usually mean accounts transfer to another firm rather than vanish — the real cost to users is disruption, forced tax events and abandoned features, not lost funds. That custody separation is exactly why our broker-check guide makes “who actually holds the money” question one.
How each obituary is written
Every entry in this series follows the same method (How We Verify): what the platform promised, what its public SEC filings show about scale and fees, what happened to client accounts, and the lesson — sourced from filings and archives, not from anyone’s press release. First entry: the platform that used to live at this domain — What happened to Recap Investing?