LatAm List – Yogome, the educational videogame startup that raised US$26.9M from Seaya Ventures in March 2018, recently announced that it would close its operations due to a case of fraud by its founder, Manolo Díaz. While the details have not been released, an official statement claims that Yogome suffered from poor financial management and “bad deals” coming from the management team.
The Yogome team made the announcement to its employees today, including the following statement:
“Today we want to transparently share with you the current situation of the company. The previous administration compromised the finances of the company by committing fraud, and the board of directors has come together to analyze the case. Based on that analysis, they have decided to close the company.”
Yogome was founded in 2010 when Manolo Diaz and his co-founder Alberto Colín (not implicated in the case), pivoted their web development business to make educational video games. Yogome was seen as one of the top-performing startups from the Latin American ecosystem after providing 8x returns to one of their first investors in March.
Santiago Zavala, partner at 500 Startups, shared the sad news with the rest of the 500 Startups portfolio via email.
“This news will make it harder to raise capital in Latin America. It will raise the expectations for transparency, corporate governance, and best practices. It will become even harder to do something that was already extremely challenging: creating successful businesses in short time, with few resources, and with much uncertainty,” said Zavala.
Read more in Forbes Mexico. We will continue to update this news as developments arise.
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