Former Twitter India Head Maheshwari allegedly threatened his Invact Metaversity co-founder
Earlier this week, it was first reported that the former Twitter India Head Manish Maheshwari founded Invact Metaversity would be winding up its operations. This news came just a few months after the edtech startup started operating. The reason is said to be ‘irreconcilable differences’ with co-founder Tanay Pratap. Pratap shared an email to the investors on May 22 giving details of the crisis. In the latest development, angel investor Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author, wrote a mail to the other investors alleging that Maheshwari has backtracked on his promise of leaving the company and wanting more equity than vested. He said that Maheshwari has bullied co-founder Pratap into silence and threatened to use USD 1.7 million of the funds to sue Pratap if he speaks ill of him in public. “I never invested to be used as an instrument of a co-founder bullying the other one,” Orosz said in the email, as per a Business Insider report. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1529801131035066368?s=20&t=28hcGnOsA3TBYE3uXoAMvw On May 23, CEO Maheshwari wrote a thread of tweets, starting off by saying that the vision for Invact was to offer a “significantly differentiated learning experience for students, leveraging the metaverse’s potential.” According to him, things started going south after the testing stage, where it became apparent that “immersive classroom and community experience were not getting delivered at a level we had envisaged”. As we started testing the early version of the Metaversity platform with students, it became apparent to us that the immersive classroom and the community experience were not getting delivered at a level that we had envisaged.— Manish Maheshwari (@manishm) May 23, 2022
“I never invested to be used as an instrument of a co-founder bullying the other one,” Orosz said in the email.
Earlier this week, it was first reported that the former Twitter India CEO Manish Maheshwari founded Invact Metaversity would be winding up its operations.
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I am a technology journalist with AIM. I write stories focused on the AI landscape in India and around the world with a special interest in analysing its long term impact on individuals and societies. Reach out to me at shraddha.goled@analyticsindiamag.com.