Jawbone raised $951M and a $3B valuation — then liquidated for parts

Jawbone, with origins in the late 1990s, pioneered three consumer electronics categories: Bluetooth headsets, the Jambox wireless speaker, and the UP fitness tracker. It raised about $951 million over the years from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, JP Morgan, Mayfield and Khosla, and collected money in 2014 at a valuation of more than $3 billion.

The decline was slow and visible. A production glitch with the UP3 tracker made Jawbone sit out the critical 2014 Christmas selling season, and the wearable market it helped create was taken over by Fitbit and Apple. Its Jambox speaker business was gone by 2016, when funds managed by BlackRock pumped $300 million more into the company in a final rescue attempt.

In July 2017 the company began liquidating, with Sherwood Partners handling the process and a legal war with Fitbit still to be settled. CEO Hosain Rahman launched a new business, Jawbone Health Hub, with a fresh, unnamed investor. TechCrunch called the ending 'the slow and painful demise' of a company that had raised close to a billion dollars.