alt Hacker NewsThe weirdest tech story in Finland right now.
The founders have sketchy track records. They do a carefully managed social media build-up. There are credible rumors that they’ve been simultaneously raising money by cold-calling moderately wealthy people around the country. (Finland has extremely little oversight for private fundraising; you can basically sell shares in your zero-revenue startup to grandma next door — as long as you’re careful about wording your claims as “projections”.)
So lots of red flags. Everyone would love it to be real of course because it’s been a long since Finland’s tech scene had a global hit like Nokia and Supercell… And perhaps the Donut founders are counting on that mood.
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It's disappointing that this merry band of serial scammers are tarnishing Finland's reputation.
The electric motorbike company (Verge Motorcycles) owned by the same people also has such bad accounting/paperwork that they could not find an auditor willing to give an opinion.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20205916 (article in Finnish)
"According to the auditor's report, no opinion was given on the company's financial statements because sufficient audit evidence was not available."
The company claims to have a couple million in inventory but no system saying anything about what is in their inventory, 300k in revenue in Finland without any papertrail of it actually happening, 2.5 million in R&D without any explanation/papertrail on what it was spent on (salaries? materials? machines?), etc.
Also the company has taken really expensive loans from family members of the leadership (12% interest which is way over the market rate).