A pair of Chapel Hill startups could soon face off in a federal courtroom, as the founders of one company have been accused of stealing trade secrets from the other and using them to start a competing business.
FeedStation, led by CEO Michael Linnane, was founded in 2013 and offers e-Commerce sellers a Software-as-a-Service( SaaS) solution to help them access marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Its focus is on the automotive space, where its technology is intended to help sellers improve their marketplace presences and optimize their operational workflows. The company won an NC IDEA grant in 2019, further giving it credibility as it grew in prominence.
Flash forward to 2022, however, and a new competitor, called Tromml, was forming in Chapel Hill. Like FeedStation, it was soliciting customers in the automotive aftermarket industry, working to help them optimize profits. And like FeedStation, it was taking advantage of local resources. Tromml won a “micro” grant from NC IDEA last year and was recently named one of 24 semifinalists for the next NC IDEA grant cycle, which could put $50,000 in its coffers.
But a lawsuit filed by FeedStation could threaten Tromml's future. The lawsuit claims Tromml and its co-founders, who are FeedStation alumni, stole FeedStation’s trade secrets and made a company.
Tromml and its founders have declined to comment on the accusations. Tromml has yet to list an attorney or respond to the complaint in federal court.
The lawsuit, filed by attorney Colin Dailey of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP on May 2 against Tromml and its co-founder, Harry Park, accuses Tromml’s founding entrepreneurs of accessing its systems and using trade secrets to craft the new startup.
Park, chief operating officer at FeedStation from August 2020 through April 2022, according to his LinkedIn page, cofounded Tromml alongside another former FeedStation employee, Lauren McCullough, who is mentioned repeatedly in the lawsuit but is not named as a defendant. McCullough was vice president of growth at FeedStation from October 2019 to February 2022.
In a recent interview with Triangle Business Journal, McCullough said she and Park started Tromml after realizing automotive aftermarket sellers were continuously using antiquated tools to monitor their performance.
“They were one dash away from making a $10,000, $100,000 mistake,” she said in April. “What we wanted to do was provide a little protection to those sellers and enable them to be successful.”
Earlier this year, Tromml began piloting its solution with three clients. McCullough told TBJ she found clients by seeking out those with the biggest pain points in the after-seller space. She found them through complaints they were making to service providers, those who ran their automation software provided their product catalogs and distributed their parts, she previously told TBJ. And she said early reception had been positive, and that Tromml already had about $4,500 in monthly recurring revenue.
But in the lawsuit, FeedStation claims she and Park didn’t do it alone – that they accessed FeedStation's client dashboard repeatedly and without permission as they were developing Tromml into a business.
The allegations
The lawsuit alleges that in 2022, Park “induced” AutoPartBoss, a FeedStation client since 2021, to request additional login credentials to access FeedStation’s client dashboard. The suit claims Park then “induced” the client to allow him to access the dashboard through AutoPartBoss’ account. McCullough also obtained login information for the account, according to FeedStation’s lawsuit. The agreement FeedStation had with AutoPartBoss restricted access to that proprietary dashboard – meaning the pair were never supposed to have those login credentials, according to the lawsuit.
FeedStation claims that Park got AutoPartBoss to forward certain data reports that the entrepreneurs then used for Tromml’s business. The pair “repeatedly accessed the Client Dashboard without authorization utilizing the AutoPartBoss Account.” The lawsuit claims the founders made “more than 152,000 known requests to the Client Dashboard from their office, their own homes, and vacation rentals, through which they accessed, downloaded, and copied data from Client Dashboard without authorization,” according to the complaint.
FeedStation claims the Client Dashboard contains confidential information, from data belonging to suppliers of automobile parts to information on Stripe, which is the billing vendor. It also contains an account page with financial information, including customer invoice history, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint also claims that the pair continued to utilize the AutoPartBoss account to access information even after creating Tromml. A cease-and-desist was sent in March, and Park and McCullough agreed to stop accessing the dashboard, but FeedStation filed the lawsuit anyway, both to recover damages “and to permanently enjoin further misappropriation of the Trade Secrets.”
