Peachy Printer, touted by its designers as the “world’s first $100 3D printer,” has imploded after its creators revealed to those who pledged to the Peachy Printer Kickstarter that around 50 percent of their money was embezzled by their financial manager, who used $320,000 of its $650,000 pledges to build himself a house.
The announcement was made by Peachy Printer CEO Rylan Grayston, who posted a video update on the company’s official YouTube channel explaining how financial manager David Bowe had used the money for his own personal gain. Interviewing Bowe regarding the missing finances, Bowe explains how his use of backers’ money was “my decision and mine alone,” with him also expressing how no other members of the Peachy Printer team were implicated in his embezzlement.
However, there are some clearly poor decisions made on behalf of Rylan in the run-up to this announcement. Rylan explains how he had a great deal of trust in Bowe due to him owning 50 percent of the company, though in an excerpt from the video, he reveals that he placed all of the Kickstarter funds that the project had received in Bowe’s personal bank account. “We launched our Kickstarter campaign before Peachy Printer existed as a company, and that means that we didn’t have a corporate bank account for the funds to arrive in,” Rylan states.
He continues: “As a temporary solution, David set up his personal account to receive the funds, and promised to hold them in trust until we had our corporate account set up. Because only David had access to his personal accounts, we couldn’t see that David was spending the money.” Rylan adds that when the corporate account was set up, Bowe added just over $260,000 into it, spending $320,000 (this doesn’t account for the remaining 9.8 percent of dropped pledges).
Rylan adds that the radio silence from Peachy Printer was a result of them “working tirelessly” for 18 months trying to devise plans in order to pull the company out of its current financial situation. “Each one of those plans would have most certainly been jeopardized if we had talked about this publicly,” he continues.
Though Rylan has provided plenty of disclosure in the wake of this controversy, it has certainly not helped ease the minds of Peachy Printer’s Kickstarter backers, who are infuriated at this latest development along with the news that the company’s CEO had transferred all of their money into his business partner’s personal bank account. In a written update on Kickstarter, Rylan has encouraged backers to contact the police and policy makers of Canada, with the authorities reportedly keen to hear from those who pledged money to the project.
Watch the Peachy Printer update video below:
