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Indian-origin startup CEO alleges $3 million extortion
Giga was founded by two IIT Kharagpur alumni, Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep, in 2023.
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Rwittika Chakraborty
- Sun, 28, Dec 2025
- 00:10 EST
- 18
Indian-origin co-founder and CEO of Giga, Varun Vummadi / X/ @varunvummadi
Indian-origin co-founder and CEO of Giga, an AI startup, Varun Vummadi, has claimed that his company is being extorted for $3 million by a small group of individuals who have illegally obtained confidential company information.
Vummadi took to X and made a post with an email screenshot, alleging that his San Francisco-based startup has been a target of an extortion scheme.
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In his post on X, Vummadi explained that several false allegations about Giga have recently surfaced on social media, made by the aforementioned group, who are now attempting to extort and blackmail his company.
Vummadi also claimed that the accused group has already posted inaccurate and defamatory information on Twitter, and is now threatening to take snippets of it, manipulate it out of context, and release it to the public unless the company pays $3 million to an anonymous crypto account.
Vummadi’s post on X led to several questions from netizens, mainly about the existence of information that his company could be blackmailed with.
One X user wrote, “If this is an active extortion attempt with stolen internal data, why is X acting as the courtroom instead of this being handled in a more legitimate way?” while another asked, “Why are you involving law enforcement if all they have is 'fake' data? An ideal person would just challenge them to reveal anything if that person doesn't have anything to hide.”
Giga is being extorted for $3Million and we want to set the record straight. There have been a lot of false allegations about Giga on Twitter recently. They are being made by a small group of individuals that has illegally obtained confidential company information and is now… pic.twitter.com/sLiTuUuHez
— Varun Vummadi (@varunvummadi) December 26, 2025
Giga was founded by two IIT Kharagpur alumni, Vummadi and Esha Manideep, in 2023. The company specialises in creating voice-based AI agents for businesses.
Both founders reportedly rejected beneficial offers to build the startup. While Manideep turned down a $150.000 job offer, Vummadi opted for the company over his Stanford PhD and a $525.000 quant trader role.
However, earlier, Giga has been accused of wrongdoings by former employees of the company, including a former staffer named Jared Steele, who publicly accused the startup of various unethical practices involving falsifying revenue figures, bribing Fortune 500 companies, and mistreating employees.
Steele, who was hired to lead demand generation, alleged that the work environment to be extremely toxic, claiming a lack of work-life balance, mandatory 12-hour shifts, and promised compensations that weren’t offered.
Vummadi, meanwhile, denied the allegations of wrongdoing, labelling them as false and defamatory, and rather claims that the recent illegally obtained confidential company information is being manipulated out of context after the company secured a successful $6 million Series A funding round in November 2025.
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