Tally Shuts Down After Hail Mary Pivot Fails
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Tally Shuts Down After Hail Mary Pivot Fails
In an abrupt announcement on LinkedIn this week, Tally CEO Jason Brown said the startup—once a consumer-facing credit card debt payoff app that made a Hail Mary pivot to a business-to-business (B2B) model earlier this year—was shutting down.
The decision to shutter the company was “difficult,” he said in the post, noting: “This was not the outcome we had hoped for, but after exploring all options, we were unable to secure the necessary funding to continue our operations.” The entire Tally staff—more than 180 people—was laid off.
The San Francisco-based fintech joins a long list of recently failed tech startups. In 2023, roughly 3,200 private venture capital-backed companies globally went out of business, according to PitchBook data compiled for The New York Times. (PitchBook told Erin Griffith the real number was likely higher, and it excluded large failures, such as WeWork, that had gone public or those that found buyers, such as Hopin.)
By going all-in on B2B, Tally faced long odds. If getting traction with a direct-to-consumer app was hard, then making a radical leap from B2C to B2B—seemingly overnight—would prove even harder, if not next to impossible.
Tally’s troubles were a long time in the making, despite an initial product/market fit that looked more than promising for the fintech and investors that included Sway Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and Cowboy Ventures, among others.