It crossed over into serious fraud when they stopped taking money to develop an approach, and started taking money on the pretence that they had developed an approach, when in fact they were just lying and performing the tests on commercial equipment they'd quietly bought elsewhere and hacked to use smaller samples (with resulting extremely poor accuracy).
And then they really fucked up when they doubled-down on this fraud by showing FDA inspectors a sham microfluidics lab instead of the actual working lab that just used standard equipment they'd quietly bought through various shells.
Later they happily poured lots of millions into Magic Leap.
Yeah, I was referring to profitability, which, for a for profit company (and one that wants to attract investments), should be part of the core vision, and without which there's no product (just something akin to "selling" $10 bills for $5).
That said, wouldn't all the "pivoting" companies prove that nobody there knew how to achieve their core product vision?
UBeam might very well flameout but I think if you are evaluating a company for fraud potential, there’s no evidence of UBeam making up complete BS to raise investments. In that case, even if their tech doesn’t pan out, as long as they weren’t massively deceiving investors, it would be a failed startup, not a fraudulent one. They are not the same thing.
So, just like most VC favorite startups?