Someone's probably already tried this.
Venture Trail is a research archive of 2,652+ startups, built for anyone about to spend months building something that might already have a known outcome. Before you commit to an idea, see who tried it, what happened, and why.
Why it exists
Startup advice is full of survivorship bias. You hear from the companies that made it and rarely from the ones that didn't, even though the failures often tried something reasonable and ran into a specific, learnable problem: a market that wasn't ready, a business model that didn't hold up, a competitor that moved faster. Venture Trail collects those outcomes in one searchable place so you can check your own idea against them before you build.
How it works
Real outcomes, not guesses
Every company in the archive is a real business with a documented outcome, sourced from public reporting, company statements, and startup databases like YC's own records.
Failures included, on purpose
Most research tools only show you who succeeded. We keep the failures in, with the reasons behind them, because that's where the useful lessons usually are.
No fabricated results
The idea evaluator only draws on companies actually in the archive. If nothing relevant exists for what you searched, it says so instead of inventing an answer.
Get started
Search the archive for your idea, or describe it and let the evaluator find the closest matches for you.