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VTuber CEO Admits To Spending Charity Money As Agency Implodes (kotaku.com)

submitted 7 months ago by osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org to c/news@lemmy.world

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Figured this was safe to post since the story was breaking containment and the CEO admitted to misappropriating charity funds on twitter.

Earlier this week, popular VTuber Ironmouse accused talent agency VShojo of failing to pay out money she was owed, including over $500,000 for charity as part of a record-breaking Twitch subathon last fall. Now, VShojo has revealed it’s shutting down after failing to raise more investment funds and the CEO has even admitted to spending some of the charity money on trying to keep the business afloat.

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[–] zlatiah@lemmy.world 16 points 7 months ago

I have been following this curious incident for the past 72 hours, it is... quite fascinating. Vshojo was the largest English vtuber company with a stellar reputation and had some of the most famous English-speaking talents (case in point, Ironmouse is probably the most watched female streamer at the moment?) and they essentially imploded in under 72 hours, probably less than 24 if you consider the cutoff point as when all the talents quit. I think the news article only scratched the surface and was probably too generous towards the founder

Vshojo was a Silicon Valley startup (this gets important later on) founded in 2021. They are/were somewhere between a talent-management company and a typical vtuber "corpo" (think Hololive, where Gawr Gura worked at). They heavily advertised themselves in a way that made them "better than Hololive", such as talent freedom, generous payment splits, ...
As the article stated, Vshojo gained $11M in series A funding... but no further VC funds. For the longest time, a lot of fans were confused about how they make money since their advertised rates for talents are extremely generous and "too good to be true". Turns out they were indeed too good to be true
According to various sources, they employed somewhere around 25-30 ppl... company is private so no one knows their exact financials, but 30 * $100K/yr = $3M/yr, which alone would make the series A last no more than 4 years. And this is not factoring in their advertisement costs and stuff like custom rigged 3D models, performances, ... I think someone crunched the numbers that their annual revenue from the talents is probably $200-300K/yr. So they have been hemorrhaging money from the very beginning
The company has a rather... unprofessional culture that has been exposed by all the talents. Stuff like their lawyer having an expired license, discouraging talents from discussing salary, slandering ex-talents who quit, having a C-suit being a sex predator, influencing opinions on 4chan's /vt/... yeah. Allegedly these issues have been around since the company's founding
The company was in deep financial troubles a year ago (probably series A ran out) and have basically not paid any of their talents or artists/commissions since late 2024, as well as cut their Japan branch manager's salary by half (they probably did a lot more). This led to a lot of talents already consider quitting. Earlier in 2025 three talents either quit or were dismissed; also two C-suits quit
Notably about the charity... the talent in question, Ironmouse, has severe CVID so she has been running donation events to the Immune Deficiency Foundation for a long time. Vshojo's CEO knows this, he even retweeted a lot of the past donation records. Last time Ironmouse received $515K which Vshojo was supposed to donate on her behalf... and the money never got delivered, likely got treated as regular revenue

There's way more but I think the community is now universally hating the CEO at the moment. Since the CEO also publicly announced embezzling charity funds... I'm wondering if he will be going to jail. Since most of the ppl involved have heavy YouTube/Twitter presence there are lots of primary evidence around if anyone is interested in more details