What Minute Media Thought It Bought

VideoVerse's flagship product, Magnifi, uses computer vision and machine learning to scan raw sports footage and spit out highlight clips, subtitles, and metadata without a human editor touching the timeline. Clients included the Portuguese Football Federation, Danish Leagues, and the ECHL. On paper, that made VideoVerse a tidy fit for Minute Media's push to control video content from creation through distribution and monetization.

Minute Media's founder and CEO, Asaf Peled, framed the deal in those terms when it was announced. "We are thrilled to bring VideoVerse into the Minute Media family to bring teams and leagues a full-stack solution from creation to distribution to monetization," he said at the time. No financial terms were disclosed publicly. Court filings and TechCrunch's reporting since have put the value at roughly $250 million, while Israeli outlet Calcalist described it as a $200 million cash-and-stock transaction. VideoVerse, an Indian company with around 300 employees, stayed a separate legal entity throughout and was never fully folded into Minute Media's operations.

That framing didn't survive contact with due diligence on the back end. By April 2026, VideoVerse's board had pushed Shrivastav out as CEO. By May, Minute Media had walked away from the acquisition completely. "After significant discrepancies were discovered in VideoVerse's representations, Minute Media decided to terminate its engagement," the company said in a statement.

The Paper Trail

The allegations, laid out across multiple complaints now in Delaware Chancery Court, describe a pattern of forged documents rather than a single bad decision. VideoVerse's former COO and president, Sabya Das, alleges Shrivastav forged his signature on loan and share-repurchase agreements to extract company funds. Separately, Shrivastav is accused of fabricating bank balance screenshots to secure a $55 million structured loan from Lingotto in October 2025, then transferring $53 million of it into an account tied to a company called Clippings on October 1. A loan payment to Lingotto came due on March 31, 2026. It was never paid.

Bluestone Equity Partners, which led VideoVerse's $45 million Series C round in December 2023, is suing on different grounds: that the acquisition itself violated the terms of its original investment, and that it never received its share of the proceeds. Lingotto wants $64 million back. Das wants $75.9 million. None of the figures overlap cleanly, because each plaintiff is describing a different slice of the same alleged scheme.

Shrivastav hasn't responded to attempts to reach him for comment on any of the filings. His last known address, listed in Das's complaint, is on the Palm Jumeirah islands in Dubai.

Three separate fraud complaints against VideoVerse founder Vinayak Shrivastav are now pending in Delaware Chancery Court. Source: unsplash.com

Who Benefits

On the numbers alone, Shrivastav is the only party who comes out ahead, at least for now. The complaints describe tens of millions moved through loan agreements and share repurchases he allegedly authorized with forged signatures, while the company he ran collected an acquisition offer built partly on the same inflated picture. He's out as CEO and unreachable, which for now insulates him from having to answer any of it in person.

Minute Media arguably benefits too, in the narrower sense that walking away from the deal before the money changed hands means it isn't the one left holding VideoVerse's debts. A termination after discovering "significant discrepancies" is a far better outcome for a public-facing media brand than owning a subsidiary mid-lawsuit.

Court filings trace tens of millions of dollars through loans, a Series C round, and a transfer to an account tied to a company called Clippings. Source: unsplash.com

Who Pays

Bluestone Equity Partners put $45 million into VideoVerse in 2023 and is now fighting in court just to see any of it again. Lingotto is out a $55 million loan with a missed payment and is chasing $64 million in recovery. Das says he's owed $75.9 million and has to litigate a former co-founder to get it. None of that money is confirmed to still exist in a recoverable form.

VideoVerse's roughly 300 employees are stuck at a company with no confirmed owner, an empty CEO seat, and a former leader unreachable in Dubai. Its customers, the leagues and federations paying for Magnifi's highlight-generation tools, inherit that same uncertainty. The record venture funding environment that pushed capital into AI startups through 2025 and 2026 made rounds like VideoVerse's Series C easy to close quickly. It didn't make them easier to verify.

Minute Media isn't walking away unscathed, either. The company cut 12% of its global workforce, around 60 people, in May 2026, the same month it terminated the VideoVerse deal, citing a need to adapt to "changes in the media market and the rise of artificial intelligence." Announcing a splashy AI acquisition and quietly reversing it eight months later isn't the kind of headline a sports-media company wants attached to a restructuring round.

The gap between what four separate plaintiffs allege happened to VideoVerse's money and what any of them will actually recover in Delaware Chancery Court is likely to stay wide for a long time.

Sources:

• How a $250 million acquisition collapsed into allegations of fraud and forged signatures - TechCrunch
• Minute Media Acquires VideoVerse, Owner of Magnifi - Minute Media
• VideoVerse raises $45 Mn in new round led by Bluestone Equity - Entrackr
• Minute Media lays off 12% of workforce, reverses course on VideoVerse - CTech