micecof

We're a startup at the pre-seed stage, me and another co-founder just recently found out our CEO has been instructing our third-party accountant to issue themselves advance payroll for like 13 weeks, while we only have roughly 8 weeks of runway left.

They never told us or discussed with us about the payroll advance, would this be considered as fraud or stealing money from the company? Would this also breach the shareholder agreement? And if so, what are the actions that we can take?

We certainly want them out for good due to their dishonest actions and in-actions at work.

FYI, we are all equal shareholders, and we just passed our 1-year cliff, with a 4-year vesting schedule.

--- Edited to add more context here ---

We are currently in a pre-seed program in a relatively large VC firm, and we are about to pitch to our head investor in a few weeks for our seed round. Thus, we have a narrow time window to make an action, and we definitely don't want to blow up our chances with our investor.