**Updated with company statement to WPN.**
Helium has been lauded as a Web3 success story, but the company has egg on its face after being dishonest about who its customers are.
Helium is creating a decentralized wireless network that serves as a peer-to-peer network for IoT devices. One of its main selling points is that it allows customers to earn crypto. The company prominently features a number of companies as customers and partners in an effort to add legitimacy to its service. There’s just one problem: Some of them aren’t customers or partners and never have been.
A report by Mashable found that, despite claiming Lime was one of its customers, Lime was not using Helium’s platform. In fact, other than a testing period in which it evaluated the possibility of adding Helium devices to its scooters, Lime was never a paying customer, let alone a partner.
“Beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium,” Russell Murphy, Lime senior director for corporate communications, told Mashable.
“Helium has been making this claim for years and it is a false claim,” Murphy said
It appears Lime is finally preparing to take action and is planning to send Helium a cease and desist.
Lime isn’t the only company Helium appears to have been dishonest about. According to The Verge, Salesforce has also denied being a Helium partner.
“Helium is not a Salesforce partner,” Salesforce spokesperson Ashley Eliasoph told The Verge. When asked about Salesforce’s logo, which appeared on Helium’s website, Eliasoph said that “it is not accurate.”
A spokesperson for the company reached out to WPN to provide the following statement:
“Since the Network launched in 2019, we’ve worked with a variety of companies on various applications and pilots. In the case of the brands mentioned in recent articles, we had approvals to talk about the use cases but we’re going to be much more rigorous now about the logo approval process going forward to avoid any confusion. Both Nova and our partner the Helium Foundation have removed the reference.”
Helium’s Financials
Helium has already been called out for only bringing in $6,500 in revenue per month, despite receiving $365M of investment, with Andreessen Horowitz taking the lead in the fundraising. The VC firm called Helium the “fastest growing wireless network ever” at the time.
Interestingly, according to Mashable, Helium CEO Haleem and Helium investor Kyle Samani confirmed the revenue numbers.
For a company being held up as the poster child of Web3, Helium certainly has a lot to answer for. Only time will tell if these are the only revelations to come out or if there’s more yet to come.
