Bankrupt nutrition app $32M in debt as ex-employees sue for salaries
The corporate behind a telephone app for figuring out a meals’s dietary worth has amassed $32 million in debt and nonetheless owes again pay to 2 dozen ex-employees because it shuts down.
Opsis Well being, of Highlands Ranch, filed for Chapter 7 chapter March 15, lower than one yr after it launched Plateful, the corporate’s signature telephone app. Chapter 7 requires an organization to liquidate its belongings and distribute them amongst these it owes cash to.
Plateful permits customers to scan 1 million meals, then assigns these meals each a dietary worth and an “eco worth” for figuring out their environmental impression, in accordance with Opsis.
“We had been unable to safe extra funding,” Opsis CEO Kevin Grundy stated in a textual content message Monday. “I can’t touch upon anything whereas the chapter proceedings proceed.”
Kevin Johnson, a Boulder man who was Opsis’ vice chairman of machine studying, wrote in a November lawsuit that Opsis thought Plateful “would revolutionize food regimen planning and vitamin monitoring.” However days earlier than it launched the app final April, Opsis’ chief working officer “introduced by way of a pre-recorded video that Opsis can be unable to well timed pay salaries.”
Throughout an all-hands assembly the following day, April 13, “Opsis management induced Opsis workers to proceed working with false guarantees that the corporate would safe funding immediately and pay workers,” in accordance with Johnson’s lawsuit, which seeks $42,500 in again pay.
Edward Wiley, the previous chief know-how officer at Opsis, wrote in a separate November lawsuit that Opsis “frequently skilled money circulate challenges, which it tried to handle by third-party financing and loans from workers,” together with Wiley.
“Because of Opsis’ cash-flow points it, on a number of events, selected to withhold earned compensation from its workers,” in accordance with Wiley, who’s owed $54,000.
Johnson’s case is scheduled for trial in July. Wiley’s is scheduled for trial in September.
Opsis additionally owes $17.9 million to the founding father of CardWorks, a subprime lender in New York, and $2.3 million to the CEO of Barry’s Tickets, an internet reseller, in accordance with chapter filings.
Twenty-five different individuals, corporations and trusts are owed a complete of $6.2 million that they loaned to Opsis, primarily within the type of easy agreements for future fairness, or SAFEs, an funding technique fashionable with tech startups that doesn’t require promoting a stake within the firm.
Twenty-four former Opsis workers are owed $372,000 in again pay, the corporate’s chapter paperwork says. Opsis additionally owes three legislation companies a complete of $100,000.
In whole, Opsis has $31.8 million in debt and $1.2 million in belongings. Its belongings are patents and laptop code for the Plateful app, in accordance with Opsis’ chapter paperwork.
Its chapter lawyer is Jonathan Dickey with Kutner Brinen Dickey Riley in Denver.
This story was reported by our associate BusinessDen.