In the Securities and Exchange Commission's Dec. 13 complaint against Sam Bankman-Fried , the regulator alleged that FTX's venture arm made two $100M investments using FTX customers' money. The SEC made no accusations of wrongdoing by the companies that received the investments. While the SEC didn't name the companies that received those funds, CNBC reported that the only two investments of that size that were publicly disclosed by FTX Ventures were in Mysten Labs and Dave ( NASDAQ: DAVE ), a fintech firm that went public in January, according to data from PitchBook. FTX Ventures made the $100M investment in Dave ( DAVE ) in March through an unsecured convertible note that matures in 2026. In September, it invested in closely held Mysten Labs, leading a $300M series B financing round that valued the Web3 company at ~$2B. Mysten Labs was founded by senior executives of Meta's Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain , which had started as the Libra payments project at Facebook in 2019, and Move programming language. Dave ( DAVE ) and Mysten Labs didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Seeking Alpha. Dave responded to CNBC that the notes' terms have no trigger for any current obligation by Dave to repay before the maturity date of March 2026. Dave ( DAVE ) CEO Jason Wilk told CNBC, "it is important to state we had no knowledge of FTX or Alameda [Bankman-Fried's hedge fund] using customer assets to make investments." DAVE shares rose 6.5% in late morning trading on Thursday. Seeking Alpha spoke last month with Wilk about the company's product and margin expansion plans.
