In a blow to tech investor pride everywhere, Silicon Valley’s venerable BlueSky Capital Partners today admitted they had inadvertently invested $27 million in a startup whose purported “groundbreaking AI architecture” was literally a repurposed Chutes and Ladders board.

“We were promised an entirely novel neural architecture capable of superhuman decision-making through sophisticated branching logic and quantum-adjacent pathways,” lamented senior partner Jed Donovan. “Turns out it was just brightly colored cardboard, a tiny spinner, and a few plastic figures from a discarded Milton Bradley box circa 1982.”

Investors were initially charmed by founder Cody Linus, whose passionate pitch deck included slides boldly stating things like “Non-linear pathways to intelligence” and “probabilistic ascension vectors.” Due diligence, which consisted largely of a Zoom call where Linus gesticulated excitedly in front of vaguely diagrammatic drawings labeled “ladders” and “chutes,” failed to spot the deception.

“Honestly, we thought ‘Chutes’ was just some quirky acronym—like ‘Concurrent Heuristic-Optimized Universal Token Evaluation System,’” confessed associate principal Margo Yi, nervously scrolling through Indeed listings. “Now it seems obvious in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20.”

An anonymous engineer within the startup explained that “model training sessions” were simply enthusiastic interns spinning the wheel, excitedly counting spaces, and arbitrarily awarding “AI decision points.” Allegedly, the startup’s “quantum computing server room” was an employee kitchenette stocked with LaCroix and a worn-out coffee maker from Craigslist.

When pressed for comment, Linus remained defiant, claiming the misunderstanding arose from a “misalignment of paradigms.” “Our model is highly interactive, stochastic, and genuinely unpredictable—exactly what every investor says they want,” Linus argued while stepping gingerly around a pile of vintage Monopoly boards.

As the tech world grapples with the fallout, BlueSky Capital has vowed to update their due diligence process to include, at minimum, basic literacy in classic board games. “We’ve been burned before,” admitted Donovan ruefully. “Last year we almost funded a cryptocurrency platform that was literally just Monopoly money spray-painted gold. But this one stings differently. Chutes and Ladders… who even plays that game anymore?”

At press time, several major firms were reportedly lining up to hear Linus pitch his next venture: a proprietary “distributed grid computing solution” suspiciously resembling Connect Four.