Forbes 30 under 30 star jailed over $10 million fraud

A 27-year-old entrepreneur has been jailed for fraud after she was found to have deceived investors in her fintech start-up.

Gökçe Güven was sentenced to 25 months in prison at a New York court last week after pleading guilty to one count of securities fraud.

This followed allegations that she lied to investors to encourage them to invest in her tech company Kalder, a start-up focused on loyalty reward schemes.

Güven, the founder and former chief executive of Kalder, misled investors about the size of her company’s revenues to raise $US7 million ($10 million) during a seed funding round in April 2024.

The entrepreneur featured on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in 2024 and was photographed for the magazine wearing a $US150,000 Audemars Piguet watch.

She is the latest in a series of rising stars featured in Forbes to later be jailed for fraud, after FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried appeared in the same list in 2021 and Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, graced the magazine’s cover in 2014.

Jamie McDonald, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said: “Gökçe Güven committed a brazen fraud at Kalder, her technology startup.

“She promised more than a dozen venture capital investors that Kalder had increasing revenue and a growing customer base – none of which was true – and then deployed those same lies and forgeries to obtain an immigration benefit.”

The court found that Güven distributed a pitch deck to investors during a successful funding round in 2024, which landed the company with a valuation of $US35 million.

In the pitch deck, the 27-year-old falsely claimed that Kalder was growing steadily and had achieved $US1.2 million worth of annual recurring revenues.

The tech entrepreneur also claimed dozens of companies were using Kalder loyalty-reward programmes, even though many had only entered into pilot schemes with the start-up at heavily discounted prices, and some lacked any agreements at all.

Kalder helps companies monetise their loyalty programmes using the slogan “turn your rewards into revenue”. In its pitch deck, it claimed to have 28 clients, including upmarket chocolatier Godiva and airline trade body IATA.

Güven, who is a Turkish citizen, made similar misleading claims to secure an O-1A visa to the US, which is specifically for individuals with extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics.

Alongside her prison sentence, Güven was ordered to pay $US6.7 million to her victims.

Before founding Kalder, Güven worked at cryptocurrency company OpenSea and fintech firm Robinhood. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley.

Telegraph, London

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