Nova Labs, the parent company behind Helium Blockchain, has agreed to pay the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $ 200,000 to settle civilian securities fraud, which the regulator has filed against the company in January, a court release Thursday.

Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle accusations that the misleading institutional investors during a financing round from the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022, raised $ 200 million in fresh capital for a valuation of $ 1 billion. In his complaint, Sec Nova Labs accused of lying to potential investors about a number of large name-customer-inclusive Nestle, Salesforce and Lime-It claimed it used helium technology.

SEC accused Nova Labs of repeatedly exaggerating the nature of its relationship with these three companies to secure investments, proclaiming them as customers and “users” of its technique. According to the complaint, Nova Labs’ actual contact with lime, Salesforce and Nestle was limited and occurred primarily before the launch of Helium Network in mid -2019.

According to SEC, for example, the scope of Nestle’s relationship with Nova Labs was a small scale test of some of the company’s component hardware in its water delivery in 2018, before Nova Labs was even in the Crypto business. Its relationship with the Scooter Company Lime was limited to two personal demonstrations by Nova Labs’ component hardware to an audience of only two lime-employees-how at least one left the company shortly after-in early 2019, SEC said.

Both Nestle and Lime eventually sent Nova Lab’s cease-and-Desist orders, according to SEC, who threatened the company with litigation, if it continued to use their trademarks and otherwise claimed to have a continuous relationship with them, the complaint claimed.

As part of Nova Labs’ settlement agreement with SEC, the regulator agreed to drop two other claims that the company violated federal securities legislation, including through the sale of three of its tokens – Helium Network Token (HNT), Helium Mobile Network -Token (Mobile) and Helium Iot Network (IoT) to be Securities, according to the settlement agreement. These claims were dropped with prejudice, which means that SEC is prevented from bringing a future case under the same claims.

Nova Labs celebrated the settlement in a blog post on Thursday and called it a “Greater Victory for Helium and People’s Network.”

“With this dismissal, we can now definitely say that all compatible helium hot spots and the distribution of HNT, IoT and mobile tokens through the helium network are not securities,” said the blog post. “The result finds that the sale of hardware and distribution of tokens to network growth does not automatically make them securities in the eyes of the SEC.”

The blog post did not mention the $ 200,000 settlement or the claim that Nova Lab’s mislead investors.

When he reached a comment, Nova Lab’s Chief Law Officer Sarah Aberg told Coindesk that while the conciliation agreement prohibits the company either admitting or denying the requirements, “we can point out that both at the time of these declarations and today the data consumption on the helium network has always been publicly available.”

The Settlement Agreement, filed in the southern district of New York (SDNY), is subject to the approval of a federal judge.