A Chicago venture capital firm has added to its board a Silicon Valley entrepreneur known for his involvement in multiple cases of domestic violence.
NIN Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm led by Nin Desai, said this week that it has named Gurbaksh Chahal to its board. Chahal is a veteran entrepreneur with a history of domestic assault. He was accused of beating a woman inside his penthouse apartment in 2013, kicking her 117 times in an attack that was caught on security camera footage. Chahal struck a deal in 2014 to plead guilty to lesser misdemeanor assault charges to avoid jail time, agreeing to three years of probation.
In July of this year a judge ruled that Chahal violated his probation when he was accused of kicking another woman in the same apartment in September 2014. Chahal also allegedly threatened to report the woman to immigration officials after she requested a restraining order.
Chahal was sentenced to a year in prison, but the sentence was stayed pending an appeal. During this time, Chahal was forced out of his company, RadiumOne, when he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor. He started a new company called Gravity4, was removed from that company when it was found that he violated his probation, and is now back as CEO of Gravity4. Separately, while at Gravity4, Chahal was sued by the company's former SVP of global marketing for gender discrimination and illegal surveillance.
Lanched by Desai in 2013, NIN Ventures invests in Series A and B rounds, writing checks between $1 million and $5 million, the company says. The firm uses a crowdfunding approach where accredited investors can invest in the fund with a minimum investment of $100,000. Desai, a former Merrill Lynch analyst, is also a strategy & corporate development advisor at Alpha Capital Partners, according to her LinkedIn page.
NIN announced Chahal's appointment to its board this week via a press release and Term Sheet was first to connect the dots. NIN and Gravity4 did not respond to repeated requests for comment Thursday morning. In the release, NIN called Chahal a "die-hard Internet entrepreneur" and lauded his experience in adtech.
“We welcome Mr. Chahal to our Advisory Board. We have great faith in Mr. Chahal and his contribution to the adtech industry and believe his addition will strengthen our position in identifying key technologies in the space," Desai said in the release.
Chahal's history has brought him plenty of bad press. In August, Fast Company called him "the biggest creep in Silicon Valley." With his reputation severely damaged following the assault, Chahal created an alter ego similar to a character from 50 Shades of Grey, which he used to manage his company, according to a story Bloomberg in August of this year:
Last year, Chahal came up with a solution: He created an alter ego named Christian Gray, according to a half dozen people familiar with the situation. The character, who shares a very similar name with one from 50 Shades of Grey, has his own LinkedIn page featuring a head shot of Josh Dallas, an actor who appears on the ABC fairytale drama Once Upon a Time. Chahal would e-mail marketing professionals as Gray, and when he hooked a potential customer, the CEO would berate staff for being outsold by a fake person, said the people, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Two people said Chahal had at times used Gray’s sales leads as an excuse to fire workers.
At the age of 16, Chahal he started his first company, ClickAgents, and sold it for $40 million to ValueClick. His second company, BlueLithium, was acquired by Yahoo for $300 million.
