As far as I know they were "Technology Partners", not running a business together. Emercoin's Name-Value-Storage (NVS) is used by other projects, including: OpenNic, Polybius, ChronoBank, and others, and I believe Emercoin CTO assisted these projects with integration of Emercoin blockchain tech. He may also have acted as trusted 3rd-party escrow for some of these projects.

I don't know anything about investors being fucked out of their funds. What I can say is that Emercoin is separate from the projects that an individual developer chooses to get involved with. Emercoin is an open-source Bitcoin/Peercoin/Namecoin derivative (with a known coin supply), a platform that everyone is free to use and develop upon.