Sabrina Willmer and David Voreacos
Pop star Selena Gomez is being accused of fraud by investors who claim she failed to deliver on promises to leverage her global celebrity and social-media following to promote her mental-health startup, which collapsed last year.
The startup, Wondermind Global, claimed a valuation of $US95 million ($135 million) when it sought money from investors in 2022 to develop products, including a mobile app, according to a lawsuit filed in Delaware federal court. Gomez, one of the founders, served as “chief impact officer” and head of marketing, the suit said.
But Wondermind lied about its prospects, and never developed the products or revenue it had promised, according to the suit filed by five investors. Gomez ignored her contractual obligations to the company in part because of her “long-running personal struggles with her mother,” Mandy Teefey, who was a co-founder and co-chief executive officer, the investors claim.
“The initiatives never materialised,” lawyers for the investors wrote in the complaint. “The app was never built. And for three years, while the company quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to the investors.”
Gomez started Wondermind in 2021 with her mother and Daniella Pierson, the founder of pop culture newsletter Newsette. It purported to capitalise on the public fascination with mindfulness, focusing on “mental fitness” by promoting routines to maintain mental health similar to how the way people use gyms to stay physically fit.
Gomez, Teefey and Pierson, who were all named as defendants in the suit, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment. An email to Wondermind wasn’t immediately returned.
In an early-stage financing round in 2022, the company raised $US5 million from the likes of tennis icon Serena Williams’s venture fund, top-tier venture firms Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. That round included $US1.2 million invested by the five individuals who filed the suit, including former Allergan CEO Brent Saunders.
The investors were lured by the promise that Wondermind would leverage an audience of more than 500 million people through Gomez’s social media channels, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs understood that Wondermind’s value as a nascent company lay largely in Gomez’s involvement, including her ability to market the company to a pre-existing, substantial, and loyal follower base,” the investors said in the complaint.
The company falsely represented that it had secured institutional employer partnerships with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Fidelity and had started a number of “revenue-generation initiatives, including advertising deals, celebrity cover stories, and a groundbreaking app,” according to the lawsuit.
The investors said they were alerted to the company’s financial distress by a September 2025 article published in The Cut. The article detailed “Gomez’s abject dereliction of her duties to the company and, indeed, her active efforts to distance herself from it,” according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs accused the defendants of concealing the “company’s operating, financial and management issues,” adding that they were only minority investors with “limited information rights.”
The investors are now seeking to recoup their investments in bringing the lawsuit.
Bloomberg
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