Albert Saniger raised $51 million for Nate, an AI-powered shopping app, while prosecutors say the actual automation rate was effectively zero percent.
In this episode, Derek and Grant trace the full arc of the Nate fraud: how Saniger allegedly staged investor demos using human contractors in the Philippines, fabricated automation rates as high as 97 percent in SEC filings, and quietly cashed out $3 million of his own shares during the company's largest funding round. They cover the infrastructure built to hide the operation — a locked internal dashboard, silenced workers, and a backup call center in Romania stood up after a typhoon disrupted the Manila team. The episode also examines how a single investigative article in 2022 accomplished what years of VC due diligence never did, and what the parallel criminal and civil charges filed in April 2025 signal about how regulators are approaching AI-washing claims. Nate was not an isolated case — Presto Automation and EvenUp followed the same playbook, raising the question of whether AI-powered has become a label investors fund rather than a capability anyone verifies.