Burn rate is how much cash a company consumes to stay in business. It is not the same thing as a loss, it is not the same thing as spending, and it is the number that decides how long the company has left before it needs somebody else's money.
Gross burn and net burn
Two versions of the number get quoted, and the difference matters:
- Gross burn is total cash going out - salaries, rent, trials, inventory.
- Net burn is what is left after the cash coming in. A company with $10M of costs and $6M of revenue has a gross burn of $10M and a net burn of $4M.
Net burn is the one that matters for survival, and it is the one used throughout this site. We take it from the cash flow statement rather than the income statement: operating cash flow less capital expenditure, over the trailing twelve months. That is free cash flow, and when it is negative, its size is the burn.
The number that matters is burn against cash
A $500M annual burn is unremarkable at a company holding $4B. A $10M burn is fatal at a company holding $40,000. Burn only means something next to the balance sheet, which is why the useful figure is the multiple: how many times its entire cash position does the company get through in a year?
Clean Energy Technologies (CETY)
CETY's last filing reported roughly $41,833 of cash against $10.3M burned over the prior twelve months.
$10.3M ÷ $41,833 = it burns its entire cash balance about 246 times a year
Which is another way of saying the company is running on money it has not raised yet. See the full CETY breakdown.
A falling burn rate is the signal to watch
Companies in trouble almost always announce cuts, and the announcement is cheap. The filing is where you find out whether the cuts happened: compare this year's free cash flow with last year's. A burn that is genuinely narrowing buys real time. A burn that is flat after a restructuring announcement tells you the restructuring was press-release deep.
It cuts the other way too. A burn rate that is accelerating while cash falls is the configuration that produces going-concern warnings, and it produces them fast.
Burning faster than the bank balance, at the time of writing
These are companies whose annual burn is largest relative to the cash they reported - all of them companies that have separately disclosed substantial doubt about continuing as a going concern. The figures come from their own filings and change as new ones land, so the list below is a snapshot, stamped with the date it was rebuilt.
As at 21 August 2026, 297 of the 466 companies on Survival Watch were burning more cash in a year than they held at the last filing. These are the most extreme.
| Company | Burn vs cash | Annual burn | Cash reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| GITSGlobal Interactive Technologies, Inc. | 3702× | $1.3M | $360 |
| CETYClean Energy Technologies, Inc. | 246× | $10.3M | $42K |
| ESLAEstrella Immunopharma, Inc. | 170× | $17.0M | $100K |
| POLAPolar Power, Inc. | 157× | $4.2M | $27K |
| ABVCABVC BioPharma, Inc. | 132× | $12.4M | $94K |
| RAINRain Enhancement Technologies Holdco, Inc. | 90× | $2.9M | $33K |
| ATPCAgape ATP Corporation | 73× | $3.3M | $45K |
| OSTXOS Therapies Incorporated | 72× | $14.7M | $205K |
| RTBRTB Digital, Inc. | 62× | $30.4M | $492K |
| FLYEFly-E Group, Inc. | 52× | $13.9M | $265K |
What to do with the number
Burn rate on its own is a fact, not a verdict. Put it next to two other things before you draw any conclusion: how much cash is behind it (that gives you cash runway), and how the company has funded the gap so far. If the answer is "by issuing stock", the burn is being paid for by existing shareholders, and dilution is the real cost.