Bay Area shipping-technology company Flexport claims in a lawsuit that a former manager and a former director stole trade secrets just before launching a rival company called Freightmate.
“Freightmate is a product of theft, not ingenuity,” the lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco U.S. District Court alleged.
Former Flexport director Bryan Lacaillade and former manager for the San Francisco company Yingwei “Jason” Zhao built Freightmate “on information and documents brazenly stolen from Flexport,” the lawsuit claimed.
Neither Lacaillade nor Zhao could be reached for comment Friday.
Zhao joined Flexport in June 2021, and Lacaillade came on board a few months later, the lawsuit said. Lacaillade left the company in April last year, and Zhao left two months after that, according to the lawsuit.
But three months before either man quit Flexport, they registered the domain name for Freightmate’s website, freightmate.ai, the lawsuit alleged.
“Months before leaving, Zhao and Lacaillade secretly conspired to form a competing company in stealth mode,” the lawsuit claimed. “Lacaillade left Flexport first to commence the company’s operations, while Zhao remained behind as a secret agent.”
Flexport said in the lawsuit that it was founded more than 10 years ago to “revolutionize global logistics with 21st-century technologies.”
Freightmate, located in Bellevue, Washington, touts on its website a product called Docmate intended to automate handling of shipping documents.
“Docmate is just the start,” the company said on the site. “We’re creating more AI-powered automation to eliminate inefficiencies and bring our vision of zero-touch shipments to life.”
Lacaillade, Freightmate’s CEO, “spent his career building logistics technology products at companies like Amazon, Flexport, and Geodis,” the website said, and he “enjoys hiking through the Pacific Northwest, wearing Hawaiian shirts on Fridays, and unwinding with a good classic novel or a stoic philosophy book.”
Freightmate chief operating officer Zhao is touted as “an expert in launching and scaling logistics technology products at organizations such as Amazon and Flexport.” According to the website, Zhao “enjoys attending NBA games, rejuvenating with his daily nap, and digging for clams throughout Washington State.”
He also dug for Flexport’s proprietary data, Flexport claimed in the lawsuit.
After Lacaillade departed the company, Zhao exfiltrated “tens of thousands of sensitive commercial documents containing Flexport’s trade secrets,” the lawsuit alleged. “Zhao downloaded hundreds, sometimes thousands, of files per day onto personal USB drives or cloud storage, employing techniques to hide his tracks.”
A few days before he left Flexport, but after he and Lacaillade founded Freightmate, Zhao downloaded and made off with a key set of Flexport’s copyrighted code, the lawsuit claimed.
“Within weeks, Freightmate launched a competing product,” the lawsuit alleged.
Freightmate’s lawsuit accuses Lacaillade and Zhao of trade secrets misappropriation and copyright infringement. The company is seeking unspecified damages and a court order barring the two men from using or disclosing allegedly stolen trade secrets or violating Freightmate’s copyrights.