This athlete turned tech bro was chasing a start-up dream. Now he’s accused of faking a PhD

Steven Leven was the exact type of person you’d want to run a gym software start-up like Zenbly. At six-foot-four, Leven had spent years playing high-level basketball for colleges in the United States, and his CV showed he paired athletic prowess with business and technology degrees from some of America’s leading universities.

By the time he’d returned to Australia, he’d notched up an impressive CV, even claiming to be a member of a United Nations association for artificial intelligence.

So when in 2019 he co-founded Zenbly, a tiny Sydney-based start-up that promised to “organise the world’s health data” by producing AI-based software for gyms, investors came to the table.

The company had soon raised $1.8 million from investors, which it used to create assets that Leven later claimed were worth between $8 million and $12 million. He boasted of having more than 10,000 users across hundreds of gyms in Australia. And despite the turbulent environment for the tech industry in early 2022, the company kept hiring.

But then several employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, noticed the PhD – apparently from Columbia University, for a doctor of philosophy in applied artificial intelligence – that hung on Leven’s office wall.

Something was off. The seal at the bottom of the certificate was a different shape from those that appeared online. The font was, too. And a double-spaced typo felt like it would have been fixed on a document from one of the world’s top universities.

But the employees’ concerns were soon overshadowed because within months, Zenbly was finished. In April 2022, the company was placed into administration and liquidated a month later. Seventeen staff, owed more than $200,000 at the time, were out of work.

And as liquidators pick over the shell of the company, the questions about Leven’s qualifications have resurfaced. Columbia University says it has no record of Leven’s attendance. The United Nations body he claimed to be a member of does not appear to exist.

The start-up world is full of entrepreneurs like Leven, striving for dreams that others see as implausible. But while heroically optimistic forecasting and bombastic salesmanship are an accepted part of the industry – which is fond of quoting a 1997 Apple ad that declared “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do” – there are boundaries. In the US, Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes is in jail after defrauding investors with claims that her start-up Theranos could detect an array of conditions from just a drop of blood.

Steven Leven was raised in Airds, a tough suburb of almost entirely public housing, in south-western Sydney. “I played basketball to get me out of trouble,” Leven told the Casper Star-Tribune newspaper in the US state of Wyoming in 2005. “My [mum] forced me into doing something. When I was young, I had a lot of bad influences, just the environment I grew up in. She wanted to get me into something that kind of occupied my time.” His mother was right. Leven had talent and basketball was his ticket to a different life.

Leven worked his way through the ranks of the local basketball scene before moving to Washington, DC as a 16-year-old. “I was getting old back in Australia,” he reflected to the Star-Tribune. “In Australia, you get blackballed for going against the grain. I’ve always been one to go to the beat of a different drum.”

Leven was soon playing for top colleges in the US, but he never stayed with a team long, following coaches and seeking greener pastures. Newspaper reports from the time put him at Auburn University in 2002, at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003, and at Wyoming University from late 2003 to 2005.

He returned home in 2006 after signing a two-year deal with the Perth Wildcats, and admitted to having “a chip on my shoulder” in his attempt to join the national team. But he didn’t settle, and soon jetted off to Europe, playing for teams in the Netherlands and the UK, according to news reports and basketball statistics sites.

Australia’s best basketballer from that period, Andrew Bogut, was one of Leven’s contemporaries. Leven told The Age in 2005 that Bogut was, at one point, second only to him in average points scored per game in the competition. “I was leading the conference and ‘Boges’ was No.2,” Leven said. But where Bogut finished his career having played in the NBA for more than a decade, including a championship win, Leven never made it to the top league.

When he returned to Australia, Leven looked no different to any other sports star parlaying their determination and drive on the court into corporate success. In a sharp pivot, he worked at various tech companies. And in 2019, Leven founded Zenbly with a friend. He looked a natural co-founder. Their vision was to create a platform that would allow gyms to track and bill their members and deliver insights with AI to make their small businesses more profitable.

A CV of Leven’s described his sporting and tertiary success in the US. Circulated in late 2019, it matches screenshots of Leven’s professional history reported on his LinkedIn page, and the text of emails that were sent in his name.

The documents list a bachelor of arts in business administration from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, along with a bachelor of science in information science from the same institution.

That was followed by a master of science in applied computer science from Columbia University in New York. And he went on to claim to have a PhD from Columbia in applied artificial intelligence.

“Apologies ahead of time, but I do use the wanker title of Dr. when doing presentations and public relations :),” he told a conference organiser in a 2021 email.

But when questions began to emerge about Leven’s education history in 2021, Zenbly’s already-faltering business became terminal.

Liquidators from WLP Restructuring, who were also Zenbly’s administrators, said in a report to creditors that the company failed for a host of reasons. WLP said Zenbly’s software had a number of faults and took too long to commercialise. They said its business had poor strategic management and too little oversight of expenses, with not enough capital.

WLP agreed with Leven that another reason for the collapse was that a key investor, a company called Vicex Ltd, refused to keep loaning money to Zenbly as agreed, leaving it without enough cash to pay staff. WLP found that Zenbly was reliant on the $1.85 million loan from Vicex, which could have been converted into a shareholding if things had gone well. After Zenbly failed, the administrators sold its assets to another company called Xoda.

Documents show other directors resigned from the company several days before it was plunged into liquidation, leaving Leven as the sole director for just a matter of days before it failed.

After this masthead put questions to Leven, Leven’s qualifications disappeared before the LinkedIn profile was removed altogether.

And liquidators from WLP Restructuring have cast doubt on his purported educational qualifications.

“We have received allegations and evidence to suggest that the director does not have certain qualifications that he represented,” reads a May 2022 report from WLP lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The document does not say which qualifications were under suspicion and liquidator Alan Walker, who was also one of the firm’s administrators when it initially collapsed, would not answer questions on that point.

Leven did attend the University of Wyoming when he was a basketball player but a search on the National Student Clearinghouse, a service that US higher education institutions use to store and share their records, does not show him completing his degree.

It describes Leven’s time there studying computer and information science as “enrolment only”.

A registrar at the University of Wyoming confirmed that a Steve R. Leven attended the university from summer 2003 to spring 2006 after being provided with a contemporaneous article describing his attendance, though his date of birth is different to the one recorded for Leven on ASIC records.

“He has not graduated from the University of Wyoming,” the registrar said via email.

The clearinghouse returned no results for Leven at Columbia. When asked about Leven’s alleged attendance, a spokeswoman for the university said: “We are unable to locate any information on this individual in our records.”

Leven has also claimed to be a member of the “United Nations Artificial Intelligence Association”. It is listed on his CV under “professional associations” and in the signature block of some of his emails sent from his Zenbly address.

But the United Nations Artificial Intelligence Association does not appear to exist. It does not have a website and searches for the body on the UN’s list of associations and specialised bodies return no results, neither does its digital library and online archive. A spokesperson for the ITU, the United Nations agency responsible for information and communications technology, said: “We can’t be in the position to say definitively outside of ITU, but this is not an association that exists within ITU.”

The United Nations’ main press office did not respond to requests for comment.

“We fully deny any claims of wrongdoing and maintain our rights,” Leven said in a brief statement, declining to answer a list of specific questions. Leven rejected any wrongdoing and said he continued to assist the liquidator with investigations, including about Xoda, referring this masthead to the public reports by the liquidator and administrator.

‘Worth between $8 million and $12 million’

Minutes from a creditors’ meeting in May last year show a lawyer then acting for Leven, Steven Mattiussi, raised a series of critical questions about how the then-administration of Zenbly had been managed, suggesting the administrators’ reports were one-sided. And he again denied any wrongdoing by Leven.

“We look forward to working with the liquidator to ensure a more fulsome and balanced investigation,” Mattiussi said, according to the minutes. “We deny the suggestion that false information may have been provided,” he said, also denying “the suggestion that the director may have breached his statutory duties”.

“The director reserves all of his rights on these issues and generally,” Mattiussi told attendees at the meeting, according to the minutes.

When Zenbly went into administration, Leven told WLP he believed its intellectual property was worth between $8 million and $12 million. But all of Zenbly’s assets, including the intellectual property, were sold for $500,000 by WLP during the administration phase. Those rights went to a new company called Xoda.

Minutes from the same meeting show Mattiusi said that “we have concerns about the amount of the sales price in respect of the company assets sold to Xoda, particularly in light of the pre-appointment activity of the company’s related parties who now have interests in Xoda”.

Xoda declined to comment.

But WLP told creditors in its reports that Leven had provided no independent valuation or details to support his claim that the company was worth up to $12 million. WLP said the sale had been made to preserve the goodwill in the business at the best price available.

The liquidator, Walker, confirmed in an email that Leven had not provided “the basis for his valuation of the business” but said Leven had been cooperating with investigations. He said he was satisfied that the best price available for the business and its assets had been achieved.

“The alternative option was to close the business immediately as there was no funding available to pay employees and keep trading,” Walker said.

In a further statement this week, Walker said: “My investigations are complete and the liquidation will be finalised in the coming months.”

The liquidator’s reports show Zenbly made minimal revenue, relative to its losses. It reported $20 in revenue in the 2020 financial year, when it lost about $93,000. The next year it earned about $50,000 but lost $372,000 and for the portion of financial year 2022 when it was operating, took in about $190,000 but posted a loss of $1.73 million.

Staff submitted claims under the Fair Entitlements Guarantee, a federal government program that gives workers financial assistance when their employer collapses without enough money to cover outstanding wages. They were all paid out in the months after Zenbly collapsed.

WLP confirmed that the company did not trade while insolvent, with the administrators being appointed in the nick of time. The company’s books and records had been properly maintained.

Leven has not made contact with most former employees since the company collapsed, former staff say. His online presence has almost disappeared, and his Northern Beaches home – with five bedrooms, two bathrooms, two car spots and a pool – is up for sale, with agents expecting between $2.1 million and $2.2 million.

Leven, who a US newspaper once dubbed the “travelling man” because of his peripatetic basketball career, has not stopped moving. A video posted on YouTube earlier this year appeared to identify him as chief technology officer at Zerologix, a Sydney company that makes financial software. In an email this week, the company said he was no longer employed there, and that it had no further comment.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.