Ex-Twitter India head and Invact Metaversity’s CEO Manish Maheshwari has signed a parting agreement from the company and he will be stepping down from his role, after almost a month-long conflict between the two co-founders. 

Demands not met

While the specifics of the final agreement could not be accessed, a source told BusinessLine that Maheshwari did not get the $2 million in shares, $2,50,000 cash, and a board seat that he demanded as his exit settlement. Maheshwari is estimated to have got just his vested stocks instead.

On May 26 evening, Invact Metaversity’s angel investor Gergely Orosz said in an email to investors that Maheshwari has earlier agreed to accept the buyout offer if he just gets to keep his vested shares.  However, Maheshwari later went back on this agreement and “asked for more equity than he vested, a significant amount of cash ( which he earlier said he would never do) and a board seat.”

According to three sources, Maheswari had asked the leadership team on April 29 that in the case where only one co-founder can stay with the company, who would they like to stay back. The leadership unanimously voted that co-founder Tanay Pratap should be leading Invact Metaversity. However, Maheshwari later vetoed the vote and the conflict got stretched. 

Maheshwari is said to have held 60 per cent shares in the company and majority seats on the three-member board. Two sources told BusinessLine, that this structure of the board and company shares made it tough for anyone to stop Maheshwari from reneging on his agreement/promises. 

Course cancelled

The company has till now laid off 20 employees and now only about 10 employees in mostly tech and operations role remain with the company. The laid off employees are said to have received two months severance, among other things. Further, 60 students were supposed to join the first batch of Invact Metaversity’s four months programme, but the batch got cancelled even before it started. 

Earlier this week, Maheswari said in a social media post, “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. We, therefore, cancelled the course before it began.”

However, multiple sources said that there was no problem in the product and the fallout was only because of the conflict between two co-founders. The company was ready with four weeks of content, while the remaining 12 weeks of content was being worked on.  

“Everyone inside the company knows that’s (failure of product) a lie. The product was working fine. Invact Metaversity even built a backup experience that is non-Metaverse based and looks like Zoom, so that if students experience any difficulties they can use that. Of course,  the Metaversity does not work on low-end laptops or fully on VR devices but that was scoped out by the team early on. Manish himself had always praised the product internally,” another source told BusinessLine on the condition of anonymity. 

According to a third source, “the co-founder conflict happened because Maheshwari wanted to focus on the Metaverse aspect of the company and not education. Whereas, Pratap wanted Invact to be an education company and not just a metaverse company. Pratap was not ready to dilute learning.” The source added that Maheshwari did not want to be seen as running an online tuition business.

Invact Metaversity, Tanay Pratap, Manish Maheswari and company’s investors did not respond to BusinessLine’squeries.

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