Now Deel is accusing Rippling of spying by ‘impersonating’ a customer

Summary

HR tech startup Deel filed an amended complaint on Tuesday in its ongoing legal battle against its arch rival Rippling that offers surprising new details about its own corporate spying allegations. Rippling sued Deel in March after a Rippling employee testified in an Irish court that he was spying on his employer for the rival in an affidavit that reads like a Hollywood movie. Rippling’s lawsuit alleges misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition, and more, largely based on the spying allegations. Deel has since countersued, attempting to get the suit dismissed for technical reasons, but also making its own allegations like that that Rippling has also been spying. This amended complaint offers more details on what Deel means by that. Specifically, it alleges that one of Rippling’s employees, who holds the job title of Competitive Intelligence “spent six months impersonating a legitimate Deel customer to gain unauthorized access to Deel’s systems to meticulously analyze, record, and copy Deel’s global products and the way Deel does business for Rippling’s own benefit and use.” The lawsuit is also full of insults hurled at Rippling’s CEO Parker Conrad and his troubles at his previous company, Zenefits. At times, the complaint ventures into psychoanalysis territory. “To understand Conrad is to understand Rippling,” the suit claims. It then goes on to speculate that Rippling has targeted Deel because Conrad is angry at Zenefits’ VC backer Andreessen Horowitz: “Sadly, it is now apparent that Conrad has made it his life’s goal to exact misguided and petty revenge on those connected with Andreessen, including Deel, in which Andreessen owns a 20% share.” And the complaint alleges that “Rippling has planted false and misleading claims about Deel in the press and with regulators across the country.” This appears to stem from 2023, when U.S. Senator Adam Schiff posted a public letter asking the U.S. Department of Labor to look into how Deel was...