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

CTOnews.com SoftBank Group's Vision Fund filed a lawsuit Monday against the founders of IRL, a social media startup in which it invests, accusing them of artificially inflating user data, lying to the fund about performance and defrauding the fund of millions of dollars.

IRL, a popular social media app for Generation Z, launched in April 2021 and appears to be "one of the fastest growing social media apps for Generation Z," according to the complaint, SoftBank invested $150 million in IRL in May 2021 based on IRL's low cost, strong user engagement and good growth potential.(CTOnews.com note: currently about 1.077 billion yuan), which includes $125 million in equity purchases from the company and $25 million in equity purchases from CEO Abraham Shafi and other insiders. At the time, SoftBank believed IRL had 12 million monthly active users.

But the complaint alleges that these figures are false. IRL secretly uses a large number of robots to create a seemingly prosperous Social networks, which are actually designed to "deceive investors." When the SEC opened an investigation into IRL in late 2022, the conspiracy began to unravel. Abraham Shafi was suspended as CEO in April 2023 and the company was dissolved in June.

The lawsuit raises questions about the extent to which SoftBank vets its investment companies. When third-party assessments of user data were much lower than IRL's self-promotion, SoftBank representatives accepted Abraham Shafi's explanation that they were "absolutely inaccurate." SoftBank has also made a number of mistakes in the past, including holding large stakes in FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange suspected of fraud, and WeWork, a depreciating real estate company.

SoftBank's Vision Fund has underperformed since the market peak of 2021, with a loss of $32 billion for the full year ended March 31, 2023.

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