E-Paper
Indian-origin CEO says ex-employees are trying to extort $3 million from his startup Giga
The co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based tech startup Giga has claimed that the company is being blackmailed in an attempt to extort $3 million.
The co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based tech startup Giga has claimed that the company is being blackmailed in an attempt to extort $3 million. Varun Vummadi took to social media yesterday to allege that a “small group of individuals” has obtained confidential company information which it is now using to extort and blackmail Giga.
Vummadi, the IIT Kharagpur-educated CEO of Giga, also shared a screenshot of the email he received demanding $3 million in cryptocurrency.
HT.com has reached out to Vummadi. This copy will be updated on receiving a response.
The allegations against Giga
In November 2025, Giga raised $61 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures. The startup, which builds voice-based AI agents for companies, was founded by Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep in 2023.
With the startup in the spotlight, a former employee named Jared shared a viral thread about alleged malpractices at the company. Jared claimed in an X post that company dashboards displayed significantly lower revenue than what was stated to him, he was misled about his title and compensation, that employees were regularly expected to work 12 hours a day, and that the founder once made an inappropriate remark about “chopping off a goat’s head in India for good luck.”
More recently, on December 15, Jared claimed that a small group of former employees and contractors of Giga have provided him with 70 GB of data that contain evidence of malpractices by Giga.
The 70 GB of recordings and documents, Jared claims, have evidence of Giga falsifying revenue numbers, hiring “female” workers in Dubai, bribing Fortune 500 companies, cheating employees out of equity and more.
The first extortion email
In a statement, Giga CEO Varun Vummadi shared a screenshot of an email the startup received on December 13.
In the email, an anonymous group claimed their aim was to put both the co-founders in jail and make them pay 10 times the value of the “equities they stole from us” — indicating that the email was sent by former employees.
“The least painful scenario for you is returning what is rightfully ours, otherwise suffer. Reveal will begin with the least damaging material and escalate to nuclear level impact (read going to jail) from the 70 GB destruction stack,” the email warned.
Two days after the first email, ex-employee Jared shared his post about a group of ex-employees and contractors of Giga sharing evidence with him of the startup’s malpractices.
The second extortion email
On December 23, Giga received a second email from the same group. This time, the group demanded a payment of $3 million.
It contained step-by-step instructions on how to buy Bitcoin and convert it to Monero. The email also instructed the founders to “sell personal equity to receive funds in a personal account for personal reasons”.
Giga’s response to extortion
In a statement dated December 25, Giga denied allegations of any wrongdoing.
“A small group of individuals has illegally obtained confidential company information and is now attempting to extort and blackmail Giga,” it said. “They are threatening to take snippets of this data, manipulate it out of context, and release it to the public with some wildly false and defamatory allegations unless we wire $3M to an anonymous crypto account.”
The company said that law enforcement has been notified and it is prepared to pursue further legal action.
“Their emails sent from an anonymous Proton email account demonstrate their attempts to extort Giga,” read the statement.
