Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens for the delivery of clues on the way! Family, this is outrageous:

For a unicorn company valued at more than 8 billion by 20 million users, 95% of its users are fake.

The protagonist is called IRL (IN REAL LIFE), which is a new social APP bet by Softbank Corp..

Let's just say that the founder of IRL calls his own product "Western Wechat".

IRL was founded in 2019, and by 2021, it boasts 20 million total users and 1200 million monthly active users, with "400% growth in the past 15 months".

Now the capital will be called Intrestine. The righteous eyes of Ruoyin Sun were attracted from this.

So in 2021, SoftBank Collector invested in IRL's round C financing of $170 million (1.23 billion yuan).

As a result, IRL joined the unicorn club, valued at $1.17 billion (8.46 billion yuan).

But now, according to The Information, 95% of IRL's so-called 20 million users are robots.

And the matter has been investigated. A spokesman for IRL confirmed the news, while its website posted a notice that the company was about to close down.

What exactly is going on?

The Middle East start-up star, founded in 2019 by cheating IRL, whose full name is IN REAL LIFE, was initially positioned to compete for Generation Z young users from Facebook to help them find interesting offline activities.

According to IRL, its social discovery network allows users to find their own communities.

In the words of Abraham Shafi, former CEO and co-founder, "We are building groups and activities for a generation that does not use Facebook."

We are the only "social" app designed to help you get off the screen and go out to participate in offline social events.

Two years after its establishment, IRL, which claims to have 20 million users, reached its highest point of glory, completing a total of $170 million in round C financing.

This round of financing is led by SoftBank's Vision 2 Fund (Vision Fund 2), followed by Dragoneer, Goodwater Capital and Founders Fund. Since then, IRL has raised more than $200m, valuing it at $1.17 billion (more than 8 billion yuan).

After this round of financing, IRL successfully joined the ranks of unicorns, and the founder with Egyptian descent was even praised by the media as "one of the most exciting talents that have emerged in the Middle East in recent years."

With 20 million users and a valuation of $1.17 billion, this represents great potential for any start-up.

And IRL did expand while the iron was hot, with about 100 employees at its peak.

What is intriguing, however, is that just last year, almost a year after receiving new financing, IRL was revealed to have laid off 25 per cent of its staff.

This is not over, CEO also took the opportunity to PUA a handful of employees after layoffs.

According to media reports, CEO encouraged the remaining employees to "adapt" and "discipline" in an internal memo, citing the fact that WhatsApp had 450 million users with a team of only 55.

I know that not everyone will want to follow the path we are taking, but for those who want to challenge their limits and abilities, this culture of the company is right for you.

In this sudden wave of layoffs, not only some employees, but also the outside world began to question whether the actual number of users of 20 million is real.

Since then, the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into IRL.

In April of this year, another former employee filed a lawsuit against IRL, accusing the company of seriously exaggerating the number of real users and being punished for talking publicly about it.

As soon as the incident was exposed, it immediately attracted the attention of the board of directors, suspended Abraham Shafi's CEO duties and conducted an internal investigation into CEO misconduct.

It turned out to be a lie. CEO boasted that 95% of its 20 million users were fake accounts.

We are just one sentence: wtf??

Based on the findings, an IRL spokesman said most shareholders had reached a unanimous conclusion that the company's future prospects were unsustainable.

Therefore, it plans to dissolve IRL and liquidate its assets and return the remaining capital to shareholders.

According to the official website, IRL was removed from the iOS App Store and closed at 12:00 local time on June 27.

Netizen: Softbank Corp. big injustice thing is too outrageous, eat melon netizens also gather more and more.

Many netizens complained about Softbank Corp. 's investment strategy:

Softbank Corp. is like a ghost lamp in the industry. Whatever they invest in is a scam. What they take out is good business (such as ARM).

SoftBank may not be the biggest injustice in the VC world. It's all about "if you're a brother, vote for me" stuff.

Indeed, in the 2021 fiscal year when Softbank Corp. invested in IRL, son also suffered the biggest loss in SoftBank's history: a net loss of 1.7 trillion yen (90 billion yuan). The net loss of Vision Fund in fiscal year 2021 was as high as 2.64 trillion yen (about 140 billion yuan).

Son said at that time that it is necessary to slow down investment and adopt a conservative investment strategy.

Another major gap mentioned by netizens is the prevalence of counterfeiting in start-up companies.

In the technology world, it is all too common for startups to falsify numbers to defraud investments.

That's how Reddit got his start.

Bragging about financing is not the first time it has happened in the field of technology.

For example, Frank, a start-up that JPMorgan bought for $175 million in September 2021, a "platform for university financial planning", was found to have been seriously fraudulent.

Of the 4.265 million users it has, less than 300000 are real.

Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, admitted that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Frank, a university wealth management site, was a huge mistake, and the deal is still in the process of litigation.

However, in the hot discussion among netizens, there is also a unique voice of this painting style:

Fake friends are better than no friends at all. Let's do it.

Reference:

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/06/25/irl-shutting-down-startup-admits-95-percent-of-messaging-app-users-were-fake/

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/26/irl-shut-down-fake-users/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/14k9xm5/unicorn_social_app_irl_to_shut_down_after/

[4] https://tech.co/news/unicorn-irl-95-users-fake-shuts-down/

[5] https://mashable.com/article/irl-shuts-down-20-million-users-bots/

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: quantum bit (ID:QbitAI), author: Shawn Yuyang

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