Documents shared by TechCrunch show that the Securities and Exchange Commission has accused content monetization startup Curastory of inflating revenues for investors and misrepresenting true customer numbers.
As a results of the SEC settlement, Curastory founder and CEO Tiffany Kelly has stepped down from that role and replaced Dave Dickman, former CEO of influencer marketing platform Tagger.
Under Dickman’s leadership, the company began fundraising, international expansion plans and product updates, Kelly and Dickman tell TechCrunch.
The settlement expressly prohibited Kelly for 10 years from serving as an officer or director of any company that was principally engaged in fundraising. A version of this agreement appeared on TechCrunch but has not yet been finalized. Kelly was found to have agreed to those provisions without admitting or denying the allegations.
Although Kelly stays a major shareholder and advisor, she told TechCrunch that “leaving the company was really the only decision I could make to keep the company alive and thriving,” she said.
Kelly founded the company in 2021. Board of Trustees is a platform that helps content creators monetize their videos and is currently used by about 400,000 creators, she said. It allows advertisers to purchase InVideo ads from creators while also tracking data and supporting other features comparable to video editing.
He has raised about $3 million thus far from investors including Lightspeed’s Scout Fund, Feld Ventures and Mindspring Capital, in accordance with PitchBook, which also listed him as a participant in several accelerator programs comparable to Techstars and the SPARK Program run by AMEX Ventures and Project W.
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“It’s been a wild ride,” she admitted. As a part of the plea agreement, Kelly also agreed to pay a fantastic.
She told TechCrunch she didn’t know what prompted the SEC investigation. She said she received a subpoena in June and the SEC issued a notice of infringement in January.
He hopes for time and grace. “It’s interesting to be forced to step down,” she said. She still owns a majority stake in the company, but said she is blissful that fundraising and finance are not on the agenda.
She said she was also blissful that she was capable of select her successor because she found Dickman through an executive recruiter. Many other washed-up founders are unable to do this. She asked the recruiter to seek out someone who was a good person, who would not strip down and sell the company for quick money, and who understood technology.
“Early stage companies face all sorts of challenges. It’s finally happened. The problem is solved,” Dickman told TechCrunch. He compared himself and Kelly to the yin and yang, having spent a long time in the makerspace and working at several early-stage startups. He said she is analytical and very product-focused, while he prefers to take a leadership role.
“I feel like we are a good combination and we complement each other to move things forward,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kelly is already seeing some changes as Dickman has been CEO for a few weeks now. She said his fundraising plan landed on the desk of a VC funder, who forwarded it to another person, urging them to take a look at the product.
“I didn’t have that experience with fundraising, as you can probably imagine,” she said, referring to the experiences that girls, especially Black women, often face when raising funds for a enterprise. “So that was an eye opener.”
Under Dickman, he hopes for a vibrant future for the company. Curastory already has plans to expand to Canada, Australia and the UK.
The company is working on recent features to focus on creators on other platforms, comparable to Spotify video, and on adding artificial intelligence to the product to make its ad tech a little more practical, she said. Current video-enabled tools include YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook Watch.
It also plans so as to add a more enhanced attribution model for advertisers that may eliminate the need for influencer promotional codes.
“These are immediate, short-term product, sales and globalization issues,” Kelly said.
Despite this shocking end to her tenure as CEO of her company, she told TechCrunch, “Being a founder and CEO is one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences anyone can have.” She hopes to share the knowledge and experiences she has gained with others, “especially women and people of color.”