The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a complaint against Alberto Saniger Mantinan, a/k/a Albert Saniger.

The complaint, submitted at the New York Southern District Court on April 9, 2025, alleges that from at least the spring of 2019 through December 2022 (the “Relevant Period”), Saniger, the founder and CEO of Nate, Inc. fraudulently solicited investments in Nate and raised over $42 million through the sale of Nate stock to multiple investors.

Saniger marketed Nate as a mobile shopping application that used artificial intelligence (AI) to complete users’ purchases across a variety of retail platforms.

While soliciting investors, Saniger touted the app’s purported reliance on AI, including machine learning and neural networks, to process transactions. But as Saniger knew or recklessly disregarded, the Nate app did not use AI to complete purchases.

During an initial seed round of fundraising between the spring of 2019 and April 2020, Saniger lied to investors about the Nate app’s use of AI and the rate at which the app successfully completed users’ purchases without human involvement.

Saniger continued to deceive investors during a second round of fundraising for Nate in the spring of 2021. Saniger misrepresented to Series A investors that the Nate app functioned based on AI, including neural networks that “understand HTML and transact on websites in the same way consumers do.”

In fact, though, by the time the Series A Round closed in June 2021, few if any purchases on the app were completed without manual processing. And although Nate later deployed automated “bots” to process some orders on the app, these bots were less sophisticated than the AI that Saniger touted to investors.

During the Relevant Period, Nate also conducted product demonstrations for investors that made it falsely appear that the app was automatically completing purchases, when in fact, at Saniger’s direction, Nate engineers and others worked behind the scenes to manually process the orders.

Saniger personally profited from his fraud, including by selling approximately $3 million of his own Nate shares to a Series A investor in June of 2021.

After a news report cast doubts on Nate’s claimed use of AI in June 2022, Saniger failed to complete a Series B round, and the company ceased operations.

Nate formally dissolved in January 2023, leaving investors with losses of substantially all their investments, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

The SEC seeks a final judgment permanently enjoining Saniger from violating the federal securities laws and rules that this Complaint alleges he has violated. The Commission also pushes for an order directing Saniger to pay fine and disgorgement with prejudgment interest.