'Disrupted or dead': AI is crushing a generation of startups built before ChatGPT
The rise of AI technologies like ChatGPT has significantly impacted startups that were thriving before its introduction. Many of these companies, once valued at over a billion dollars, are now struggling to secure funding due to outdated technology and inflated valuations. As a result, a substantial number of these startups have seen their valuations decline sharply, leaving them in a precarious position in the market.
- ▪Venture capitalists previously invested heavily in startups, leading to inflated valuations.
- ▪The introduction of ChatGPT has reshaped how companies are valued and has left many pre-AI startups struggling.
- ▪Nearly half of the U.S. unicorns have not raised fresh funding in the last three years, leading to significant valuation declines.
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| Original publisher | CNBC — Business |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/ai-startup-valuations-pre-chatgpt.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:10:58 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T17:12:50.620Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T17:12:50.620Z |
| 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 | nP9UaYU9yRes |
| 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 |
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| 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
Five years ago, venture capitalists were pouring money into American startups selling everything from lingerie subscriptions to scheduling software, anointing them with billion-dollar valuations before most even turned a profit.It was a frothy era for startups, fueled by a combination of cheap money and pandemic-boosted demand. But even after the Federal Reserve took some froth off by starting to raise interest rates in 2022, many founders believed that they could grow into their inflated valuations, investors told CNBC.Then, an app called ChatGPT arrived."The ChatGPT moment was when people said, 'Holy smokes, the next generation of entrepreneurs, their coding language is spoken English,'" said Samir Kaul, a partner at the venture firm Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI."Now…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNBC — Business.
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