When VideoVerseannounced its acquisitionin September 2025, it felt like a victory for startups across India. VideoVerse was a simple clipping service, but after years of startup incubators and pitching clients, the company had pulled off a $250 million exit.
The acquirer was Minute Media, an international sports publisher split between New York and Tel Aviv, with plans to scale VideoVerse’s clipping software beyond its Indian niche and into the lucrative world of international sports.
Less than a year after the announcement, the deal has unraveled.
Reached by TechCrunch, a Minute Media representative said that “after, among other things, significant discrepancies were discovered in VideoVerse’s representations, Minute Media decided to terminate its engagement with the company.”
While not a household name, VideoVerse became a key player in the billion-dollar clipping industry, providing automated tools for editing long-form broadcasts into the shorter clips that travel well on social platforms.
Its flagship product,Magnifi, is an AI-powered tool that can automatically identify key players and moments. Using the software, clients could easily generate packages of every three-point shot in a basketball game, for instance. Backed by an extensive human support team, the platform attracted high-profile clients like the Indian Premier League, FIFA+ and Nippon TV.
It is a lucrative niche, and one in which Minute Media had hoped to expand to the U.S. market before VideoVerse’s internal problems surfaced.
Even across the multiple cases against Shrivastav, there are conflicting claims and inconsistencies, as investors struggle to make sense of the current state of the company. What is clear is that tens of millions of dollars are missing, and there are already disputes about where the money went and how much is owed to whom.
But Lingotto now says critical documents provided by Shrivastav were forged. Minute Media’s CEO never signed the documents, the lawsuit alleges, and screenshots purporting to show internal bank balances were also fabricated.
According to the terms of the loan, Lingotto was owed a $4 million payment on March 31, but it never arrived. When the investment firm called in the full amount of the loan with interest, it discovered a long list of people waiting to be paid by VideoVerse. A separate loan from Bluestone Capital had gone into settlement a few months prior, with similarly overdue payments. By the end of April, Shrivastav was out as CEO.
The following months have produced a web of overlapping court claims, as Minute Media, Lingotto, and Bluestone each seek restitution in Delaware Chancery Court. A separate claim from former COO Sabya Das alleges a more complex tangle of fraud involving secondary sales and a confidential high-interest loan.
Shrivastav did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him for this story. His most recent listed address, which appears in Das’s complaint, is on the Palm Jumeirah islands in Dubai.