Grocery delivery firm Instacart Indian-Canadian cofounder Apoorva Mehta has been accused in a lawsuit of using stolen trade secrets to create a healthcare startup that was a duplicate of an existing company.
Hello Logistics Inc, which runs under the name NextMed, sued Mehta, his business partner Tejasvi Singh, and their company Cloud Health Systems over allegations of misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement, and other claims. Both firms run websites advertising weight loss.
“Wanting in on NextMed’s success, and in search of venture capital funding for a new project,” Mehta teamed up with Singh, “to do what Mehta later said he considered ‘unethical but not illegal’— create a copycat company,” NextMed said in the complaint filed Dec 19 in Manhattan federal court.
Singh, a cofounder of NextMed, gathered some of the company’s closest held trade secrets under the guise of gathering the information as part of due diligence for investors, according to the complaint.
Mehta and Singh then utilized the information to create a company that does business as Sunrise, with a copycat website, according to the complaint.
They also lined up vendors and implemented NextMed’s highly confidential customer acquisition and other plans, “in mere weeks,” NextMed claimed in the complaint.
Mehta’s new company which was launched a few weeks ago has already raised $30 million from two venture capital firms, NextMed said.
NextMed is seeking an order to shut down the Sunrise website and unspecified monetary damages.
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