Who Is Karthikk Shenoy? Internet Calls Racist Bengaluru CEO A 'Fraud With No Employees'

Karthikk Shenoy went viral this week after a post on X in which he announced that his company would stop hiring male candidates from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. Shenoy said the decision followed the dismissal of a male employee from one of those states over alleged misconduct toward female colleagues, and claimed the move was backed by a Rajasthani employee already on his team. However, he is now under the scanner as a little research by internet users reveal that his company 'A1 Sports World' has been shut down since 2019 and that his company profile has only one employee listed on LinkedIn - himself. Netizens are calling him a fraud with 'no financials, no employees, and a shady website.'

Users allege the company and the incident don't exist

As the post spread, several X users pushed back with claims that A1 Sports World has no employees other than Shenoy himself, and that the "fired employee" and the "Rajasthani girl" who allegedly backed the decision were both invented. One user, posting from the handle @badassatronnn_, described the episode as a one-employee company's founder firing an imaginary employee for harassing an imaginary colleague, with the decision imaginarily endorsed by a third imaginary person.

Another user, posting from @up_10t_army, went further, alleging that Shenoy has a pattern of inserting himself into trending conversations with fabricated stories about a company he claims to run, and suggested, without offering evidence, that the posts were a way of drawing attention from women online. Both of these claims remain unverified and are attributed to anonymous social media accounts, not to any confirmed investigation.

Shenoy himself posted about A1 Sports World shutting down?

Adding weight to the skepticism, a LinkedIn post attributed to "Karthikk Shenoy," dated roughly a year ago, describes shutting down A1 Sports World entirely. In it, Shenoy writes about walking away from a government job nine years earlier to build the venture, scaling it to 31 schools and over 2,300 children, and then unravelling under financial strain liquidating savings, mortgaging his home, and facing an investor withdrawal and an alleged theft of Rs. 10 lakh. The post ends with him announcing the company's closure and promising pending staff salaries would be cleared within 30 days. Corporate-records aggregator Tracxn's filing history for the associated entity, listed as Futstart Experience Private Limited, shows no filings recorded past 2019, which critics have cited as further reason to question whether A1 Sports World is currently an active, functioning company.

Shenoy has not, as of this writing, addressed the specific allegations that his company is defunct or that the employee and colleague named in his viral post do not exist. The claims made by X users about his motives remain speculative and unconfirmed, and Free Press Journal has not independently verified the current operational status of A1 Sports World beyond the LinkedIn post and Tracxn filing record cited above.