Happy Monday.

No one wants to shut down their startup. And if you had to, there historically weren’t a lot of clean, end-to-end options to handle it for you.

Until now.

If you missed us at SF Tech Week, we hosted three fireside chats with SimpleClosure: The Art of Starting Again, What Your Company Data is Worth, and Zero to Unicorn with Bolt.new.

And today, we’re excited to finally dive into their story.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

There’s a playbook for launching a company. There’s almost none for closing one.

When a business needs to shut down, there’s paperwork that involves lawyers and accountants, tax obligations to the government, and ensuring everyone involved is paid properly, and so much more. Then, to further dampen spirits in this difficult time, there are the unpleasant conversations notifying any employees and stakeholders about closure and what’s next. It’s a bureaucratic process that often takes months to years. Meanwhile, there are around a million businesses that legally dissolve each year in the U.S.

SimpleClosure is building software designed to simplify that entire process based on its three main services: shutdown services, AssetHub, and Payroll. Each one covers a specific part of the process, from all steps of the product shutdown to closing out payroll, as well as securely monetizing and preserving any valuable assets. Its suite of tools is built for every involved party, including business owners, lawyers, investors, financial services, financial advisors, and payroll providers. 

Beyond simplifying a scattered process, SimpleClosure wants to save founders time and money while making one of the hardest moments of their careers a little easier.

Check it out: simpleclosure.com

SimpleClosure’s pricing depends on factors like the company’s industry, the complexity of its operations, its investment structure, and how many states it’s registered to do business in. The team meets with each customer to decide which services they need, so they only pay for those. 

Its main offering is the shutdown service that coordinates every legal, tax, operational, and administrative obligation of closing a company. Founders often come in looking for help with one step, like dissolution filings or tax accounts, but those steps are usually interconnected, so the process tends to be more comprehensive.

The only separate offerings are AssetHub and payroll account closure. AssetHub helps closing companies sell valuable assets, most often code or data bought by frontier AI labs, after removing personal and sensitive information. Payroll account closure handles the state payroll tax accounts that stay open even after a company stops running payroll.

Dori Yona was a founder before starting SimpleClosure in 2023. When a board member suggested he shut down his second company Earny, he learned that no single provider managed the end-to-end process of dissolving a business. In that process, he bounced around multiple lawyers, accountants, and others. Furthermore, he knew that over 90% of startups fail. Seeing an opportunity to provide expertise and structure to the already stressful and confusing process of business shutdown, he began building what became SimpleClosure.

He co-founded the company with in Nimrod Ram, a serial entrepreneur who had spent 10 years at a startup called Riskified and had also seen his share of startup closures. Given Yona’s lived experience as a startup founder who had to shut down, SimpleClosure was initially built for venture-backed startups. With a clear vision and prior experience as a founder, the team raised a pre-seed round within 24 hours. 

Since then, SimpleClosure has supported over 8,000 companies, added new features (including AssetHub), and expanded its support to any business looking to shut down.

Nobody starts a company planning to shut it down.

Unfortunately, every year it does become the reality for hundreds of thousands of businesses in the U.S.

To put that into perspective, more than 22% (218,861) of the 1 million new businesses measured closed within their first year. From the emotional toll of deciding whether or not to close to the final decision, these business owners have already been through a lot before even beginning the process of shutting down. 

SimpleClosure started not only with a good understanding of a problem that impacts millions of people, but came in with incredible empathy. Dori Yona, SimpleClosure’s founder and CEO, went through the stressful process of closing a business as a startup founder. So, he wanted his product to accomplish two things. First, it should shorten the process from months or years to weeks. Second, it should bring relief to business owners who are probably feeling defeated and worn down. 

SimpleClosure told us its most recent undertaking is expanding its customer base to all businesses, now that it has proved the product model is successful among venture-backed startups. While some of the nuances may vary, the fundamentals of closing a business don’t change much, whether you’re a local food truck, a bootstrapped solopreneur, or the CEO of a corporation. 

Venture-backed startups represent only about 1% of all businesses that open every year in the U.S., while hundreds of thousands of businesses with employees close every year. No matter the case, there’s paperwork and questions around taxes and assets that SimpleClosure was built to handle with its comprehensive set of shutdown services. So expanding beyond the startup domain opens up an enormous market. We also expect the number of businesses that both start and close to increase with the prevalence of AI. 

Speaking of AI, SimpleClosure sees a high-leverage opportunity with AssetHub. As LLMs grow in popularity, demand for specialized data to train AI models has also exploded, and companies such as Protege (a previous cover on The Highlight) have emerged to fill that gap. 

This is an opportunity for businesses in the process of shutting down to recover value from their code and data, which is valuable to AI labs. That’s money that can go toward covering debts or simply walking away with something. SimpleClosure built AssetHub with this boom in mind. Since its launch six months ago in April 2026, AssetHub is on pace to return over $10 million to founders this year. This is a great value proposition for SimpleClosure users. 

Last, but definitely not least, SimpleClosure offers payroll account closure. Stopping payroll, whether for a shutdown, leaving a state, or simply no longer running payroll, doesn’t automatically close a company’s state payroll tax accounts. Missing a step can lead to future fees or penalties. SimpleClosure identifies accounts and tracks each closure. 

We mentioned the rollercoaster of emotions around closing a business. This is most apparent when looking at the ecosystem that drives SimpleClosure’s business and the community that it is building.

In fact, while these business owners are the end beneficiary of SimpleClosure’s product, they’re just one of many users of SimpleClosure. Beyond just data brokers, lawyers use SimpleClosure to bring in their clients who are shutting down businesses, and payroll providers like Intuit and Gusto partner with SimpleClosure to make sure all taxes and pay stubs are accounted for. Meanwhile, stakeholders like investors or financial service providers use SimpleClosure to assist with a smooth closure. 

Aside from building a great product, part of its GTM involves building community and changing the narrative around closing a business by providing support and community for customers who use its products. That’s because SimpleClosure wants them to feel relief and have their burden lifted, and it doesn’t want them to have to use SimpleClosure again, as that would mean they’re shutting down another business. 

So, recently, it’s developed the “Second-Time Founders Club,” a community of founders who have shut down using SimpleClosure as well as investors, mentors, and others, with the hopes that they can cooperate to succeed in their next venture. That can be starting a business or transitioning to a job. During SF Tech Week, we covered this topic at our fireside, “The Founder Reset: The Art of Starting Again,” co-hosted with SimpleClosure.

SimpleClosure has developed valuable tools that have been made with empathy for the customer. We believe it’s plausible that it can, at the same time, remove the social taboo and shame around closing a business. We’re optimistic it can also become the go-to option for shutting down businesses. As SimpleClosure puts it, knowing it’s time to shut down is hard, but doing it doesn’t have to be.