It wasn’t a new biotech company. Vivek created a company to market a failed drug that he had purchased from Glaxo. Oddly enough the drug still didn’t work even after he sold millions of dollars of stock to investors who were led to believe that it would. I guess they didn’t read the fine print in the prospectus.
Vivek R.’s company, Roivant, was founded to pursue longshot strategies. In essence, drugs and drug class candidates that have progressed through late stage clinical trials can fail as to their intended disease target but may then be successfully revised or repurposed. Roivant and its subsidiaries are pursuing that strategy, hoping for one or two big successes that offset years of losses. It is a chancy business strategy but is not a fraud.