The furor over Anthos Capital started with a solitary post, just like innumerable internet pile-ons that came before it.
Last Thursday, Siqi Chen, a longtime tech executive and angel investor,
shared an anecdote on X that flies in the face of convention in respect to founders, their investors and keeping scuttlebutt under wraps.
He wrote: “had a vc pull a term sheet on a portfolio company at the last minute, when they were on their last month of runway, for basically no reason 2 years ago.” The post continued: “same company is exploding in revenue now, and just raised a $30M series b…anyway i hope he saw this.”
Eyes lit up and replies poured in. One account urged Chen to “name and shame” the culprit of the alleged misdeed. “fuck it…it was anthos capital,” Chen wrote.
Other founders swooped into Chen’s inbox to relay similar experiences with Anthos Capital, and Chen–who didn’t respond to an Inc. request for comment–shared their messages while protecting their anonymity.
The founders also accused the Santa Monica-based Anthos Capital of doing the unforgivable: Backing out of a major capital infusion right before the finish line, as startups were angling for VC gold. The accusers offered no proof, but observers say that deals get pulled more often than people outside the boardroom might realize.
“That type of stuff happens…more often than we know. And I guess a lot of times people don’t talk about it, because they want to stay in the good graces with potential investors,” Matei Psatta, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Blindspot, a platform for digital billboard creation, tells Inc.
It happened to Psatta’s company with a different investor six years ago, when Blindspot was on the hunt for seed funding, he says. “We actually had a signed shareholder agreement and everything, and they pulled out at the last second. Mostly from what we can figure out, it was a capital thing for them–they just ran out of capital at some point.”
Investors backing out at the last minute was more common during the peak froth of 2021, Psatta says, when everyone in tech was courting capital amid an historic gold rush. “When things came back to normal, a lot of people kind of found themselves in a situation where they couldn’t honor their commitments,” he explains.
Ripping up a term sheet doesn’t necessarily have any legal value, as they are generally a strong signal of intent rather than a guarantee. But blasting a VC on social media can have serious repercussions, Psatta says. Namely, burning bridges.
Still, that doesn’t mean people will shy away if they feel speaking out is justified. Many VCs flooded Chen’s mentions, some of whom lauded his courage,
while others accused Anthos Capital of doing the same thing to their portfolio companies. Not all replies were the same: Ryan Hudson, founder of e-commerce platform Honey,
stressed the good experiences he had working with the investor.
Anthos Capital didn’t respond to an Inc request for comment.
For his part, Psatta says Blindspot was okay after its seed funding deal fell through. “We basically put all our angry feelings aside for a while and just focused,” he says. Staying lean and not growing too quickly was key in the absence of the money. “We just focused on whatever was the low hanging fruit, but we’re pretty lucky” to not have suffered more drastically as a result of the collapsed deal, he says.
