Manish Maheshwari, the previous head of Twitter India, is leaving the startup he co-founded simply six months in the past following disagreements with co-founder and traders.
“I’m transferring out of Invact to first take a break for just a few months after which pursue new alternatives. It’s heartbreaking for a founder to go away the startup, like a mom leaving her child. I’m going by means of the identical emotion,” Maheshwari, who served because the startup’s chief govt and managing director, wrote in a tweet.
Maheshwari co-founded Invact Metaversity with Tanay Pratap late final 12 months, as TechCrunch first reported. The startup, which has raised $5 million thus far, seeks to launch a metaverse the place cohorts of scholars might take courses. However the startup has thus far struggled to ship a product as the 2 co-founders locked horns and disagreed on the imaginative and prescient, based on an e mail Pratap despatched to traders earlier this month.
Maheshwari, who owned extra fairness of the startup than Tanay, based on an individual conversant in the matter, assumed broader management over the startup’s path.
Issues grew to become extra sophisticated after Gergely Orosz, an early backer of Invact, publicly known as out Maheshwari for allegedly not listening to any investor, reneging on exit agreements and holding the startup “hostage.”
“Manish has been bullying Tanay into silence, threatening to make use of the corporate funds of $1.7M – together with our angel funding cash – to sue him, ought to Tanay communicate ailing of him in public,” Orosz wrote to traders this week in an e mail, reviewed by TechCrunch.
“This broke the straw with me, as that features my cash: which I by no means invested for use as an instrument of a cofounder bullying the opposite one. Manish retains strolling again on guarantees he made to named traders, then breaking them. Names traders had been assembly the phrases he put as much as settle for the exit settlement so the corporate can proceed working. He then walks again on these phrases. He has been doing this for weeks,” he wrote.
Invact raised a $5 million spherical earlier this 12 months from Arkam Ventures, Antler India, Picus Capital, 2am VC and dozens of angel traders at a valuation of $33.5 million. It was placing collectively a brand new spherical at a $100 million valuation, based on a supply conversant in the matter. Later it explored sale of the enterprise, however couldn’t discover a purchaser.
In his Twitter thread at this time, Maheshwari described Tanay as “brother.”
