Fitbit

What worked

Created the consumer fitness-tracker category outright and dominated it for a decade, selling more than 100 million devices by 2019 and over 120 million in 100+ countries by the January 2021 closing.
Delivered one of the defining consumer-hardware IPOs of its era: priced above range in June 2015, raised $732M, popped 48% on day one, and hit a ~$10B market cap that August.
Peaked at $2.17B in revenue and 22.3 million devices sold in fiscal 2016 — numbers no standalone fitness-wearable company has matched since.
Reached all of that on only about $66M of venture capital, an order of magnitude less than rival Jawbone burned losing the same market.
Won the fitness-band wars, absorbing the remains of Pebble ($23M), Vector Watch, and FitStar while outlasting Jawbone entirely.
Exited to Google for $2.1B, and its health-tracking software stack lives on as the foundation of the Pixel Watch and Google's health platform.

What broke

Squeezed from both ends of the market — Apple Watch above, cheap Xiaomi bands below — Fitbit's share of wearables fell from 24.1% to 12.9% in a single year (Q2 2016 to Q2 2017).
A one-category hardware business with no platform moat: when tracker growth stalled, the stock fell 75% in 2016 and profitability never returned.
The smartwatch pivot came late and cost heavily: the Ionic arrived in 2017 well behind Apple, then became a safety liability — a ~1M-unit recall in 2022 after 78 burn injuries and a $12.25M CPSC penalty in 2025 for delayed reporting.
Sold to a platform owner with its own wearable ambitions: Google wanted Fitbit's health software and user base for the Pixel Watch, not Fitbit's hardware lines.
Progressive dismantling under Google — retail withdrawn from 29 markets (2023), founders gone (January 2024), smartwatch line terminated (August 2024).
The brand was finally executed on May 19, 2026, when the Fitbit app and Premium were renamed Google Health and legacy Fitbit accounts were terminated, with unmigrated user data deleted after July 15, 2026.