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Comment by tyrfing | Hacker News Reader

Interesting company. It was created in 2018 [1], and the CEO is Michael Heyward, who was a co-founder of Whisper. Some interesting shuffling happened with Whisper [2] and it's now owned by MediaLab. Since then they have acquired a number of other properties, the general idea seems to buy declining brands for cheap and extract as much value as possible on mobile. [3] There is no public information on their funding.

1. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...

2. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-whisper...

3. https://www.assemblyexchange.com/about-us - their job ads feature this ad network prominently.

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The whisper founders threatened to default on the debt they raised from SVB, then used inside money to buy it at cents on the dollar. because debt is senior to equity, they then wiped out the equity raised and kicked sequoia, shasta, and lightspeed off the board. then raised PE to fund a series of purchases of apps such as kik, and a lot of android apps with churned users with always-on location permissions turned on. They then used that data to build a small ad network.

Buying Kik alone is a really shady move. By now it's famous for being a porn exchange with no enforcement. Darknet Diaries has a long episode about it. I now remember where I heard from Medialab before.

Source? Because if true this is pretty baller move but also a big f.u to VCs

I think they are the source. Whatever happened, it was interesting, and seems to have been effectively buried. There are only a few interesting breadcrumbs, like this patent's assignment history: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9075812B1/en

Note the re-assignments in mid-2018.

Holy shit. That's a mafia move against VC.

Pretty much guarantees that these folks will never raise another round from anyone ever again, though.

Way to burn bridges...

Darknet Diaries episode on Kik messenger has some background on Medianet https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

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