Flexport is suing Freightmate Ai for “brazenly” stealing trade secrets and data, and using it to launch a competing product. The lawsuit comes just two months after Freightmate raised $5M.
The evidence is shocking, per The Loadstar:
- One co-founder, Yingwei Yu (Zhao) left Flexport in May 2024. The other co-founder, Bryan Lacaillade, left the company in April 2024.
- Flexport claims that Lacaillade left the company first, to startup Freightmate, while Zhao remained behind to download tens of thousands of files onto personal USB drives or cloud storage.
- The domain freightmate-ai was registered on January 28, 2024, months before either co-founder left Flexport
- Days before leaving, Zhao downloaded Flexport's the source code for Flexport's internally developed Flexport Platform, and then launched a competing product a few weeks later.
- The co-founders admitted to taking confidential documents “to understand how generative AI digitises shipping documents.”
- However Freightmate refused to allow any review of its source code to determine how much was original versus taken from Flexport.
- Zhao and Lacaillade were original members of the team that developed Flexport Forwarding App and its automation tools.
I'll be curious to see how this case plays out! In the meantime, I have a feeling I know what a lot of that $5M investment will be going towards…