A new lawsuit filed by logistics giant Flexport alleges that two of its former employees stole thousands of confidential files before leaving and launching their own Seattle-area startup.
Freightmate CEO Bryan Lacaillade and CTO Yingwei (Jason) Zhao are named as defendants in the suit filed last week in federal court in California.
The lawsuit alleges that Lacaillade and Zhao “secretly conspired to form a competing company in stealth mode” while they were still at Flexport, which provides cloud-based freight forwarding and brokerage services.
Lacaillade departed Flexport last year while Zhao “remained behind as a secret agent, to exfiltrate tens of thousands of sensitive commercial documents containing Flexport’s trade secrets,” including the company’s source code, according to the suit. Zhao used techniques to “hide his tracks,” the suit said.
When confronted by Flexport last year, Freightmate admitted to taking confidential documents without permission and using those files to understand how generative AI digitizes shipping documents, according to the suit.
But Freightmate did not allow Flexport to review its source code and claimed Flexport’s confidential files were “inadvertently retained” and not accessed or used, according to the suit.
The suit notes that “Freightmate’s ability to rapidly serve Flexport’s competitors and customers would not have been possible without Defendants’ improper access, copying, disclosure, and use of Flexport’s intellectual property.”
Flexport is seeking both monetary and injunctive relief, as well as the return of all proprietary documents and destruction of unauthorized copies.
“Freightmate is a product of theft, not ingenuity,” the lawsuit states.
In a statement to GeekWire, a Freightmate spokesperson said: “We dispute Flexport’s claims and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court.”
Lacaillade was the director of product management at Flexport, while Zhao was a principal technical program manager. Both had joined the company in 2021 after working at Amazon in logistics-related roles.
Freightmate aims to streamline how freight forwarders process documents and data. The company’s first product, Docmate, automates digitizing and categorizing documents, validating data, and flagging discrepancies, among other features.
Freightmate raised $5 million in a seed round led by Fuse in January, and raised a pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures last year.
Freightmate co-founder Rishab Gadroo, who spent 13 years at Amazon in various engineering roles, is not named in the lawsuit.
Freightmate is among a growing list of logistics tech startups based in the Seattle region, buoyed by companies including Seattle-based Amazon and Flexport, which has an engineering office in the area.
Founded in 2013, Flexport is one of the leading privately held global supply chain companies, and was valued at $8 billion after raising a $935 million Series E round in February 2022. It raised an additional $260 million from Shopify last year.
Former Flexport CEO Dave Clark, who left the company in September 2023, co-founded Bellevue, Wash.-based supply chain startup Auger and raised $100 million in October.
Read the full suit below.
