The SearchVoat Forum

Kape will acquire LTMI from its co-founders and shareholders Andrew Lee and Steve DeProspero, for a total consideration of c.US$95.5 million to be satisfied by a combination of c. US$52.9 million cash and issuance of c. 42,701,548 new Kape ordinary shares ("Consideration Shares") to be paid in three phases...


...Founders' future involvement in the enlarged group
Andrew Lee has agreed to provide consulting services to Kape for a period of three years following completion through a separate services company. Steve DeProspero is not involved in the day-to-day operations of PIA and therefore will not have an ongoing role in the business following completion. Several of the Senior Executives have also agreed to ongoing employment agreements with PIA to ensure continuity of management.
Ted Kim, LTMI's CEO, will, on completion, join the board of Kape as a non-executive director and as a representative of the Founders.

...It is anticipated that completion of the Acquisition will occur early 2020.

Kape Technologies plc is pleased to announce that it has successfully raised gross proceeds of US$115.5 million (£89 million) pursuant to the Placing and the Retail Offer. A total of 59,230,769 new ordinary shares of US$ 0.0001 each were subscribed for by investors, at an issue price of 150 pence per Placing Share.
The Board of Kape is pleased with the very strong response to the Fundraise from existing institutional shareholders, a number of new blue-chip institutional investors from the UK, USA, Israel and Asia and through PrimaryBid. The Fundraise was significantly oversubscribed, greatly exceeding the initial target raise of US$100 million.
The net proceeds of the Fundraise will be used as follows:
To buy out the equity interests in the Company of Andrew Lee and Steven DeProspero (the “PIA Founders”), the two co-founders of Private Internet Access (“PIA”), a company acquired by Kape in 2019; and
the balance to strengthen Kape’s balance sheet and enable fast execution of further selective acquisitions, building on Kape’s excellent M&A track record and continuing pursuit of growth.

Kape Technologies Plc (AIM:KAPE) agreed to acquire Private Internet Access, Inc. (PIA) from Andrew Lee, Steve DeProspero and other shareholders for approximately $130 million on November 18, 2019. The consideration will be a combination of $52.9 million in cash and issuance of 42.7 million Kape’s ordinary shares to be paid in three phases.

In 2009, Lee founded London Trust Media (LTM), a private holdings company. In 2010, he founded Private Internet Access (PIA), a virtual private network service for anonymizing Internet traffic.[3] He claimed to have started PIA because of his interest in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), whose users' IP addresses could be easily revealed, but only after the Freenode purchase.[4] Lee and co-owner Steve DeProspero sold LTM (and its subsidiary PIA) to Israeli company Kape Technologies for US$95.5 million in November 2019.[5][6] Lee co-founded Mt. Gox Live, a bitcoin price tracker that was later acquired by the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.[7]

In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated and transferred ownership of Freenode Limited to Lee;[8] Dahlskjaer and Lee said the company was solely for funding the network and running the Freenode #live conferences.[9][10] According to staff, they were not informed of the contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations, as the company only managed the conference and nothing else.[10][11] A dispute over changes Lee imposed in 2021 resulted in all of Freenode's twenty to thirty staff members resigning.[9][10] This team went on to form a new network called Libera Chat.[9]

Savesequim wrote: ↑Tue Nov 22, 2022 5:26 am He appears to be from CA and at one timed lived in Palo Alto (near Stanford U)

Outside of a single lawsuit regarding a collision, and a few business registrations, he is a ghost.

The Deprospero family from NY may or may not be related, however, there are/were many members of that family in the aformentioned careers.

IMO he's more important than Andrew to understanding what Voat was/became

https://archive.ph/2021.09.14-024700/ht ... ose-to-1b/