Nate, the shopping app that drew attention last year for overstating its use of artificial intelligence technology to power its transactions, has stopped processing payments on its app and has cut most of its workforce, according to three people directly familiar with the matter.
The moves suggest Nate is poised to become the latest casualty among e-commerce startups. The New York-based startup, which was backed by Coatue Management and Forerunner Ventures, offered people the ability to make shopping lists on its app. Nate charged shoppers a fee for filling out payment information on retailers’ web sites to make purchases of products easier, a process it said was done with AI.
But as The Information previously reported, Nate actually relied on workers overseas to manually enter the data for many of the transactions. Nate did not disclose use of these workers to some of its potential investors when pitching the app.