February 5, 2025
Investors in the Utah ‘unicorn’ say Pluralsight misled them.
Pluralsight will pay $20 million to a group of early investors to settle claims the Utah tech giant misrepresented its success to investors in its early days as a public company.
The settlement ends a nearly five-year and “very hard-fought” legal battle between Pluralsight, one of Silicon Slopes’ flagship tech companies, and a group of investors responsible for public employees’ retirement funds in the Midwest, said plaintiff’s lead attorney Carol Gilden at the final settlement hearing Tuesday morning.
The class action lawsuit, first filed in 2019 and revived in 2022, claimed Pluralsight and its founding executives knowingly misled investors about their company’s success, artificially inflated stock prices and cashed out before stock prices plummeted.
The lead plaintiffs in the case are two funds responsible for managing retirement and benefit accounts for public employees in Indiana and Chicago, Illinois. Each fund bought thousands of common stock shares when Pluralsight went public in 2018, according to court documents, and lost millions of dollars as a result.
A federal judge dismissed the claims initially, but an appeals court in Denver revived many of them in 2022. The revived case also names founder and then-CEO Aaron Skonnard, and former Chief Financial Officer James Budge, as defendants.
Pluralsight will pay $20 million to a group of early investors to settle claims the Utah tech giant misrepresented its success to investors in its early days as a public company.
The settlement ends a nearly five-year and “very hard-fought” legal battle between Pluralsight, one of Silicon Slopes’ flagship tech companies, and a group of investors responsible for public employees’ retirement funds in the Midwest, said plaintiff’s lead attorney Carol Gilden at the final settlement hearing Tuesday morning.
The class action lawsuit, first filed in 2019 and revived in 2022, claimed Pluralsight and its founding executives knowingly misled investors about their company’s success, artificially inflated stock prices and cashed out before stock prices plummeted.
The lead plaintiffs in the case are two funds responsible for managing retirement and benefit accounts for public employees in Indiana and Chicago, Illinois. Each fund bought thousands of common stock shares when Pluralsight went public in 2018, according to court documents, and lost millions of dollars as a result.
A federal judge dismissed the claims initially, but an appeals court in Denver revived many of them in 2022. The revived case also names founder and then-CEO Aaron Skonnard, and former Chief Financial Officer James Budge, as defendants.
Read Pluralsight Reaches $20 Million Settlement with Public School Retirement Funds.