- Rippling has created a hotline for companies to flag ‘suspicious behavior’ by its chief rival, Deel.
- Rippling filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing Deel of using a corporate spy to steal company secrets.
- The company also sent document preservation letters to Deel board members.
Rippling has put out a Bat-Signal to summon help with its lawsuit against a competitor.
Rippling, which has had a public and bitter rivalry with Deel that predates a lawsuit it filed Monday, created a hotline for companies to report suspicious activity by Deel, the company told Business Insider.
“Shortly after we filed the lawsuit, we began receiving numerous unsolicited reports from companies who experienced suspicious behavior by Deel over the last several months,” a Rippling spokesperson told Business Insider.
Rippling’s legal team also ramped up its case against the rival human resources technology company on Tuesday by sending letters demanding that Deel’s five board members preserve documents potentially related to the case, another Rippling spokesperson confirmed.
One of the board members, Yasmin Razavi, also serves on the board of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Another, Anish Acharya, is a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Neither Deel nor the company’s five board directors immediately responded to Business Insider’s requests for comment for this story.
Both Rippling and Deel have competed fiercely for clients, and each have been valued at north of $10 billion.
Rippling’s lawsuit filed Monday accuses Deel of competing unfairly by recruiting a Rippling employee to spy on the company and steal its secrets.
The alleged mole, according to the lawsuit, performed numerous searches in Rippling’s internal Slack, Google Drive, and Salesforce databases. The spy found information about Deel customers who had spoken to Rippling about signing up with its human resources technology services instead, and then funneled that intelligence back to Deel, the lawsuit alleges.
A representative for Deel denied “all legal wrongdoing.”
The website for Rippling’s hotline asks for information about “similar activity” to the allegations in the lawsuit. If it receives credible tips, it could bolster the company’s accusations in court that Deel misappropriated trade secrets.
The lawsuit alleges the corporate spy stole lists of prospective and existing clients, and that Deel could have used that proprietary information to woo clients to its own platform.
Have a tip? Contact the reporters via email at [email protected] and [email protected] or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01 or @JacobShamsian.07. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
Read the full article here
