FTX diverted $200 million of customer money for two venture deals that caught the SEC’s attention
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried leaves following his arraignment in New York City on December 22, 2022.
Ed Jones | AFP | Getty Images
Of the billions of dollars in customer deposits that disappeared from FTX in a flash, $200 million was used to fund investments in two companies, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged founder Sam Bankman-Fried with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors.”
Through its FTX Ventures unit, the crypto firm in March invested $100 million in Dave, a fintech company that had gone public two months earlier through a special purpose acquisition company. At the time, the companies said they would “work together to expand the digital assets ecosystem.”
The other deal the SEC appears to have referenced was a $100 million investment round in September for Mysten Labs, a Web3 company. In total, it was a $300 million funding round that valued Mysten at $2 billion and included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs and Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund.
While FTX Ventures has done dozens of transactions, according to PitchBook, the Mysten Labs and Dave investments were the only two disclosed investments of $100 million, based on documents published by the Financial Times, which broke down how the company put $5.2 billion to work. FTX Ventures was described as a $2 billion venture fund, in its press release with Dave.
Bankman-Fried, 30, stands accused of committing widespread fraud after FTX, which was valued by private investors at $32 billion earlier this year, sank into bankruptcy in November. A central theme in the charges is how Bankman-Fried diverted funds from FTX to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, which then used that money for risky trades and loans. FTX Ventures was allegedly part of that scheme.
Neither Mysten nor Dave have been linked to any alleged wrongdoing within Bankman-Fried’s empire. But the investments appear to be the first identified examples of customer money being used by FTX and Bankman-Fried for venture funding. As investigators and FTX lawyers attempt to retrace the outflow of FTX funds, these identified investments and others in the $5 billion venture pool will attract heavy scrutiny.
In explicitly linking the two $100 million investments to customer money, the SEC has raised the possibility that they’ll be prospects for clawbacks. If FTX bankruptcy trustees can establish that client money funded Bankman-Fried’s investments, they could pursue recovery of those funds as part of an effort to retrieve customer assets.
A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment.
Dave CEO Jason Wilk told CNBC that FTX’s investment in Dave is already scheduled to be repaid, with interest, by 2026. FTX’s $100 million investment was through a convertible note, a short-term loan of cash that FTX could convert into shares at a later date. That conversion was never made, leaving Dave with a $101.6 million liability, including interest, to FTX and any successor companies, according to the company’s most recent SEC filings.
Jason Wilk
Source: Jason Wilk
“The note issued to FTX is due for repayment in March 2026,” the company said in a statement. “No terms contained in the note trigger any current obligation by Dave to repay prior to the maturity date.”
Wilk added that, “it is important to state we had no knowledge of FTX or Alameda using customer assets to make investments.”
Bankman-Fried’s investment in Mysten Labs was an equity deal. Because Mysten is a privately held company, there’s no clearly defined process in U.S. bankruptcy code for clawing back those funds.
Mysten declined to comment. Lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell, which represents FTX, did not respond to requests for comment.
An SEC complaint filed against two of Bankman-Fried’s lieutenants, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, specified that “two $100 million investments made by FTX’s affiliated investment vehicle, FTX Ventures Ltd., were funded with FTX customer funds that had been diverted to Alameda.”
Irrespective of what money was being used, FTX’s investments were ill-timed.
Dave shares have plummeted over 97% since the company went public, mirroring the performance of the broader basket of SPACs. In July, the Nasdaq warned Dave that if its share price didn’t improve, it was at risk of being delisted. The stock currently trades for 28 cents and the market cap sits at around $100 million.
Alameda Research had previously made a $15 million investment in Dave in August 2021, before the Nasdaq listing. Dave was founded in 2016 and offers customers a free cash advance on their future income as part of a suite of banking products. Mark Cuban led a $3 million seed round in 2017.
The investment could have been lucrative for FTX if Dave’s share price had improved beyond $10 a share, allowing FTX to convert at a profit.
FTX’s investment in Mysten came in the midst of a crypto meltdown. Bitcoin and ether were down by more than half for the year and numerous hedge funds and lenders had gone bankrupt.
The funds were to be used in Mysten’s effort to “build a blockchain that scales with demand and incentivizes growth,” Mysten CEO Evan Cheng said at the time.
Representatives for Ellison and Wang did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.
Ellison, 28, and Wang, 29, pleaded guilty in New York last week to federal charges over the illicit use of customer funds for trading and venture investments, allegedly directed by Bankman-Fried. Both are cooperating with federal investigations into Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.
WATCH: The terms of the $250 million bail agreement for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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