Ivan Ravlich attended the College of Auckland earlier than his stint at Stanford.
Ivan Ravlich went from head boy of Kerikeri Excessive Faculty to a nationally acclaimed tech entrepreneur within the US in slightly over a decade. However the New Zealand-raised scientist, in recent times named on the Forbes journal 30 beneath 30 listing, now faces accusations he and his co-founders defrauded buyers. George Block reviews.
A Northland highschool graduate is on the centre of a lawsuit in California alleging he and his co-founders defrauded tens of millions of {dollars}’ price of cryptocurrency from buyers in his embattled start-up.
Courtroom paperwork obtained by the Herald present an investor alleges Ivan Ravlich and two different co-founders of Hypernet Labs lied to buyers whereas failing to develop any viable services or products.
The investor, who claims to have misplaced greater than NZ$1 million price of cryptocurrency at present values, alleges the founders used a purported Cook dinner Islands shell firm to make it more durable for buyers to attempt to recoup their losses.
He has filed the lawsuit in a California courtroom to attempt to get better the cryptocurrency he sunk into the start-up, the paperwork say.
The Herald can reveal the opposite two co-founders named within the go well with have now left Hypernet, together with a senior supervisor.
Ravlich didn’t reply to requests for remark and the opposite co-founders couldn’t be reached.
Ravlich, whose father is a New Zealander with household nonetheless dwelling in Auckland, loved a meteoric rise from Kerikeri Excessive Faculty the place he was head boy and dux in 2007.
The next yr he went to the College of Auckland to check Chemical Engineering and Supplies Science on a scholarship.
The younger tech whizz later jetted off to California’s famend Stanford College, the place he accomplished a masters.
Whereas learning for a doctorate, he based and have become chief govt of a start-up known as Hypernet Labs in 2017 with fellow Stanford graduates Todd Chapman and Daniel Maren.
In a glowing alumni profile on the College of Auckland’s web site, Ravlich mentioned he based Hypernet with the intention of creating the start-up “the connective tissue between all computing sources across the globe”.
An early investor, who spoke on situation of anonymity, mentioned the start-up was billed as providing varied cloud computing companies the place customers would pay through Hypernet’s personal cryptocurrency token.
Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies, akin to Bitcoin, that don’t depend on a government like a authorities or financial institution. Their values soared throughout the pandemic however have lately been in free-fall.
Hypernet’s first product was an app known as Galileo, geared toward researchers who undertake simulations.
The early investor claimed when Hypernet charged folks for Galileo it accepted cost through bank card, not its personal crypto token, which the investor believes seems by no means to have been used as meant.
In 2020, Ravlich was named one in every of Forbes journal’s “30 Underneath 30” within the science class.
His profile on the Forbes web site mentioned Galileo had been utilized by authorities businesses and an area propulsion firm.
It claimed Hypernet had lately raised $10 million in new capital.
However the early investor claimed communication from the corporate had been missing over the previous two years.
About 9 months in the past, Hypernet “pivoted onerous” into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the investor claimed.
NFTs are a controversial sort of digital monetary asset typically taking the type of artwork of doubtful aesthetic benefit.
They’re traded on-line, often utilizing cryptocurrency, with which they share comparable underlying code.
The marketplace for NFTs exploded in worth final yr however the bubble quickly burst. By Might this yr, the Wall Avenue Journal mentioned the market was collapsing.
College of Canberra researcher John Hawkins, writing in The Conversation, mentioned the NFT market shared similarities with a ponzi scheme and the bubble was inflated by movie star endorsements and “crypto mania”.
The early investor claimed none of his fellow backers supported the pivot to NFTs.
As an alternative, they believed it was a “knee jerk response to the flavour of the day”, and doubtless a yr late to make something of the craze, he mentioned.
He’s blunt in his evaluation of the motivation behind the pivot to NFTs.
“I consider it was a last-ditch try and discover a non-existent marketplace for a non-existent product,” he mentioned.
On March 22 this yr, attorneys for a serious Hypernet investor, Romein Rostami, filed a lawsuit naming Hypernet Labs, Ravlich, Chapman, and Maren as defendants. The investor who filed the lawsuit just isn’t the early investor who spoke to the Herald.
Maren’s LinkedIn profile has been scrubbed of any point out of Hypernet, however a profile on his highschool’s web site relationship from 2019 describes him as a co-founder.
Chapman’s LinkedIn says he left the corporate in April this yr.
A doc filed in the US District Courtroom for the Northern District of California by Rostami’s attorneys says they’re looking for the return of 728 Ethereum cryptocurrency tokens “which defendants procured from plaintiff by way of fraudulent means and the sale of unregistered securities”.
On the time, his crypto funding was price US$339,248 however it could be price US$863,408 on the time of writing.
The courtroom doc mentioned the corporate initially claimed it was “poised to vary the world by making high-performance parallel computing a client good”.
“By doing so, Hypernet claimed, with its platform, people and corporations may ‘lease [their] in any other case wasted computing energy to different those that need to use it – and be paid for it’,” the doc mentioned.
In the summertime of 2018, the founders supplied and bought to the general public the long run proper to cryptocurrency tokens, for use on the Hypernet platform, known as “Hyper Tokens”.
“By means of these efforts, defendants raised roughly $20 million in an preliminary coin providing (‘ICO’).”
Rostami, a US citizen dwelling in Puerto Rico, was a type of buyers.
He alleges within the lawsuit they by no means created a useful platform as described or the Hyper Token.
“As an alternative, defendants lied to buyers by way of trade white papers, pay to play promotional promoting, and different fraudulent advertising gimmicks to induce funding and utilised the enterprise as a automobile to perpetuate fraud for higher monetary achieve.”
He mentioned the advertising across the Hypernet tokens was rife with deceptive statements.
His lawsuit additionally claims the founders directed workers or brokers of Hypernet to drive buyers to signal a contract with a enterprise entity purportedly shaped within the Cook dinner Islands.
Because of this, he claims that they pressured buyers to agree to hunt the decision of any disputes within the Cook dinner Islands pursuant to Cook dinner Islands regulation, regardless of the corporate being solely primarily based in California.
However whereas Hypernet was purportedly shaped beneath the legal guidelines of the Cook dinner Islands, there isn’t a present file of the corporate with the Cook dinner Islands Ministry of Justice’s firms register.
“In different phrases, Ravlich, Maren, and Chapman created a sham firm overseas to discourage buyers from recouping losses and utilised the sham settlement to shift investor ICO funds to HLI [Hypernet Labs, Inc.], a United States primarily based entity (having no privity of contract with buyers), to pocket giant sums of cash for little to no growth effort,” the lawsuit mentioned.
Considered one of Rostami’s attorneys instructed the Herald from her New York workplace that the lawsuit remained lively and her consumer meant to press forward with the motion.
Ravlich didn’t reply to requests for remark through his varied social media profiles or his electronic mail handle.
The opposite co-founders couldn’t be reached.
The one reply got here from a person listed on-line as Hypernet’s head of promoting and communications.
“I resigned from Hypernet final Friday – you have to to contact Ivan immediately,” he mentioned.
In his College of Auckland profile, Ravlich mentioned beginning Hypernet was step one to spreading computing energy around the globe.
“Beginning Hypernet is one small step to additional all sectors of science and know-how with our mission of realising moral, ubiquitous computing.”
Additionally a multi-instrumentalist musician who likes ballroom dancing, Ravlich instructed the College it was at Stanford the place he discovered the advantages of risk-taking.
“My dance trainer at Stanford taught me rather a lot about experimenting, going with the circulate and taking dangers.”