Sateeq Founder Faces Allegations of Financial Impropriety Amid New Venture Plans: Moneycontrol Investigation

Just wanted to give some updates now that it has been 1 month since the last post 1) Senior Leadership from Tech (3) , a senior director from Product , Finance Head have all resigned. Strategy team has been dissolved. 2) There are more people in the pipeline and will get more clarity by month end. 3) Everyone over the CTC of 60 lakh has been asked about the revenue that they bring in and based on that, their position is being reconsidered. 4) All contract workers have been terminated. Interns have been told that they won't be receiving PPOs. 5) Senior Management Has been asked to take 20% paycuts. 6) Even at Junior level, people have been asked to take pay cuts or resign. 7) Lots of tools used in tech are being removed and AWS subscription has also been revised. Meanwhile HRs have been celebrating on slack channels that Yubi has been ranked in Top 25 companies for career development :/

TLDR from article: - 5K+ investor-partners have not received their instalments from Growpital - The headcount has reduced from 100+ to less than five, the website is shut down - Besides running the CIS scheme ‘illegally’, Growpital is also said to have fake projections But adding some more info: - A friend had met Growpital when they were raising a round. Everywhere in the media, Vineet Gupta's name is mentioned. But Prashant Pitti was the pitching founder at the time. - There was a report that one of the Tier 1 VCs had even funded them, but never came in the news, maybe deal fell through - Now very conveniently, none of this is shared by media as context. Just strange.

Investment & social media not aligned 🥹

This is an interesting trend fully driven by VCs/board

Recently I was talking to a girl who was working a startup in BLR. She left the startup with some horrendous experiences. This startup was working from a startup hostel in BLR. Things she told me shook me. She was dating the founder. So this founder who claims to be on his 2nd startup dates his own employees and then blackmails them. The average age of his employees is 24. All these girls that he dates are not above 23/24 Apparently this guy has 2 court cases against him. One for fraud and one for a rape case. Both of them are not easily found online. He uses VC money to keep in under the hood. The fraud case is about his first startup which was a stolen idea apparently. This guy’s whole life is fake. He claims to be an IIT Madras dropout, but he's from some local college. There are rumours that one of the girls he dated tried to kill herself because he allegedly filmed them. He also does not pay salaries for months to his employees but compensates by giving them expensive gifts. He claims his parents are IAS officers but we checked and they are not. His last startup was around around AUTH and current one is around Fintech Girls and boys stay away from working with such shady startups.

And founders themselves embezzling more than 45Cr

Classplus is falling apart. The CTO, CBO and VP-Business have resigned from the company amidst rumours around financial irregularities. Classplus now joins a long list of Indian startups caught amidst fraud/financial irregularities allegations. Classplus was last valued $600Mn in their last funding round and counts Tiger Global, Falcon Edge, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) as their investors.

willl try my best to be honest, ask me anything