A unicorn engaged in fraud, investors lost 3 billion yuan

Introduction

THECAPITAL

Amazing Case Revelation

This article is 3741 words, about 5.3 minutes

Author | Wang Tao  Editor | Wuren

Source | #Rongzhong Finance

(ID: thecapital)

Not long ago, the panel of the Bandung District Court in Indonesia officially read out a verdict, causing the entire Southeast Asian primary market to hold its breath.

Aquaculture unicorn eFishery was once called “the crown jewel of Indonesian agricultural technology,” and its founder Gibran Huzaifa was sentenced to 9 years in prison for embezzlement and money laundering (TPPU), with an additional fine of 1 billion Indonesian rupiah, and he can appeal within seven days. The other two former executives involved, Angga Hadrian Raditya and Andri Yadi, were sentenced to 9 and 7 years in prison, respectively.

This incident is extremely rare in Southeast Asia’s tech circle in recent years—a star figure once crowned “unicorn founder” was actually sent to prison through criminal means by judicial authorities.

This verdict also closed a six-year-long double bookkeeping scam, which had been ongoing from 2018 to 2024. SoftBank under Masayoshi Son, Singapore’s Temasek, former Sequoia India Peak XV, Abu Dhabi’s 42X Fund, Malaysia’s largest public pension fund, Switzerland’s impact investment firm responsAbility, 500 Startups, Polaris Group, Aqua-Spark, plus debt financing from HSBC and DBS—all these institutions, which nearly represent the top standards globally in due diligence, were still deceived for five or six years by the same “touching story + beautiful numbers.”

Among them, Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund also continued to invest in eFishery in Series C in 2022 and Series D in 2023. When the truth was finally uncovered, the 9-year prison sentence marked the legal end of this farce.

From “Indonesian Aquaculture Light” to Prisoner

Gibran’s life has seen a huge fall. According to an exclusive interview published by Bloomberg a year ago, the origin of the eFishery scam can be precisely traced back to a late-night Excel spreadsheet in 2018.

At that time, Gibran was still the CEO of a startup that was about to run out of cash in three months, with around a hundred employees eagerly waiting for their salaries. The numbers on Gibran’s desk looked terrible—if he couldn’t secure the next round of funding, his company would go from “the future star of Indonesian aquaculture” to just another failed story.

So he opened the report, increased the figures one by one, and in less than an hour, he completed what he had failed to do in five years in the Excel sheet. When he pressed send, he thought investors would soon see through the lie, but unexpectedly, no one called him out.

From that moment, eFishery had two sets of books: one real, for internal review; the other inflated, for investors. This dual-track operation continued until 2024, lasting six years.

How big was this fraud? In early 2025, FTI Consulting conducted an internal investigation for eFishery. Looking at just the first nine months of 2024, eFishery publicly reported revenue of $752 million, but the actual revenue was only $157 million—over 75% of the reported income was fabricated. During the same period, the company claimed to have deployed 400k smart feeding devices in the field, but FTI’s verification found only about 24k units—an inflation of nearly 16 times. In just these nine months, the fictitious revenue was close to $600 million.

From 2018 to 2024, the total loss caused to investors by eFishery was approximately $300 million, according to multiple media reports. Once valued at $1.4 billion with nearly 2,000 employees, the “Indonesian aquaculture light” was far smaller in real size than everyone imagined once the bubbles were deflated.

Looking back, eFishery’s collapse showed signs as early as the second half of 2023, when rumors of “financial engineering” began circulating; by December 17, 2024, the company quietly announced a “leadership adjustment to strengthen internal governance,” vague as it was, revealing a crisis at the board level; in January 2025, FTI’s investigation draft leaked unexpectedly; in April, Bloomberg published Gibran’s confession; and by August, Indonesian police detained the three of them. A year later, on April 29, the Bandung District Court finally delivered its verdict, bringing the legal chapter of this story to a close.

How to Fool Top Investors?

In January 2022, eFishery completed a $90 million Series C funding round, with a valuation exceeding $400 million. The round was led jointly by Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund II, and Peak XV (Sequoia India’s fund), with all major existing shareholders like Polaris Group, Go-Ventures, Aqua-Spark, and Wavemaker participating. This was the first time Masayoshi Son’s fund entered eFishery’s shareholder list, and as one of the initial lead investors.

Just a year and a half later, in July 2023, eFishery announced Series D financing. The publicly announced amount was $200 million, but according to filings with Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), the initial closing was about $108 million, with the company’s valuation soaring to $1.3 billion, and some internal sources even reported up to $1.4 billion.

This round was led by Abu Dhabi’s 42X Fund, which invested nearly $100 million; SoftBank Vision Fund II added about $5 million; Polaris Group also invested around $3 million. New investors included Malaysia’s largest public pension fund, Swiss impact investor responsAbility, and Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups. Goldman Sachs served as the exclusive financial advisor for the round.

It was this Series D funding that crowned eFishery as “the world’s first aquaculture unicorn.”

The list of investors—Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, Singapore’s Temasek, India’s Peak XV, G42’s AI fund from the UAE, Malaysia’s pension fund, Swiss impact investors, Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups, and Southeast Asia’s Polaris Group—together with debt financing from HSBC and DBS, and Goldman Sachs as the exclusive financial advisor, formed a nearly foolproof due diligence and investment logic. Yet, this scam still deceived them all for five or six years.

What convinced these top investors was an almost perfect entrepreneurial story. Indonesia is the world’s second-largest aquaculture country, but its industry development rate is only 7-9%, and the industry is highly dispersed with almost no digital infrastructure. Gibran, coming from a catfish farming background, had built his career from the very bottom—this narrative of “founder and sector highly aligned” was exactly what LPs favored.

He was working on smart feeding devices, integrating IoT, data accumulation, and financial inclusion—offering feed financing and sales services to small farmers without any financial coverage, and providing “antibiotic-free, traceable” shrimp products to middle-class consumers and European importers. Each layer of this story hit the most popular keywords among LPs over the past decade: technology, inclusion, ESG, sustainability. Coupled with an impact report claiming “a 45% income increase for farmers, contributing 1.55% to Indonesia’s aquaculture GDP, and a 92% lower carbon footprint than livestock,” this package was almost morally unassailable and financially promising.

eFishery was not engaged in “gray accounts,” but operated two sets of books openly for six years. The exposure of this shocking case began with a brave whistleblower. The whistleblower’s revelation triggered an internal investigation, which led the eFishery board to hire the internationally renowned consultancy FTI Consulting for an independent probe. All evidence was eventually made public.

Patrick Valuy, CEO of Indonesia’s largest tech group GoTo, publicly stated at a business forum that “falsifying financial reports is a shameful act.” Even a board member used such stern words, and external investors later recalled feeling a chill.

“I knew it was wrong,” Gibran admitted during the trial, but he attributed part of the blame to the “growth pressure” and peer imitation in the venture capital industry: “But when others are doing it and still get away with it, you start to question whether it’s really wrong.”

His claim that “it was just to keep the company afloat” no longer held water after six years of fraud and nearly $600 million in inflated revenue.

After a 9-year sentence, Southeast Asia’s VC ecosystem also fell into a trust crisis. From a judicial perspective, this is an extremely rare case of a “star founder” in Southeast Asia’s tech scene being sentenced for financial fraud. In most emerging markets over the past decade, similar-scale financial frauds usually ended with civil settlements, share buybacks, or quiet winding-up. The Bandung District Court’s verdict this time drew a clearer line between “startup failure” and “criminal offense” at the judicial level.

Another impact of the verdict is a deterrent effect on future entrepreneurs. In the coming years, every late-stage project in Southeast Asia will be repeatedly asked at LP partner meetings: “But how do we know this isn’t the next eFishery?” This phrase effectively discounts the region’s valuation premiums.

The immediate consequence is that valuations of Indonesian and Vietnamese unicorns will be compressed, due diligence will be more comprehensive and earlier, and investors will prefer verifying directly with clients and distributors rather than relying solely on company data; founder-led governance structures will accelerate toward board-dominated models. Some regional audit and accounting firms will also face a structural credibility reassessment under LP scrutiny.

A deeper question is whether this is “Gibran’s personal misconduct” or an “inevitable outcome of industry incentive structures.” Over the past decade of relentless growth-driven VC culture worldwide, financial embellishment has always been in a gray zone. Most companies’ gray areas involve only a few percentage points of adjustment, but eFishery pushed this into 75%, turning it from gray into outright black.

Gibran’s predicament in 2018—having only three months of cash and a next-round valuation that would determine the company’s fate—was a common scenario for early-stage founders; prolonging the company’s life by six months and telling a more impressive story—was that a rational choice under similar pressures? This is a more unsettling question for the VC community than the individual founder’s conviction.

For Chinese primary market readers, this case also offers a personal lesson. Over the past three years, Chinese institutions have increased their allocations to Southeast Asia, with projects in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore frequently appearing in domestic LP portfolios.

The takeaway from the eFishery case isn’t “Southeast Asia is off-limits,” but a necessary recalibration of risk parameters. In cross-border projects, local partners, independent third parties, and thorough cash flow checks from distributors are indispensable; when a project is repeatedly backed by top-tier institutions, the question shouldn’t be “Should I also co-invest?” but “Has FOMO (fear of missing out) replaced proper due diligence?”

For founders, the Indonesian judiciary’s conviction of a tech founder for money laundering signals that those once considered “business risks”—gray operations—are increasingly being reclassified as criminal risks.