The court battle between a pair of Chapel Hill startups appears over before it really started, as both sides have reached a resolution without a trial.
FeedStation filed suit against Tromml last year, accusing it and its FeedStation alumni cofounders of stealing trade secrets and creating a competing company.
The parties recently filed jointly to dismiss the case with prejudice.
FeedStation, led by Michael Linnane, was founded in 2013 and offers e-commerce sellers a Software-as-a-Service solution to help access marketplaces such as Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (NYSE: EBAY). Tromml was formed in 2022, and, like FeedStation, solicits customers in the automotive aftermarket industry.
The initial lawsuit filed in federal court claims Tromml and co-founders Harry Park and Lauren McCullough (who is not named as a defendant) stole its trade secrets, accessing its systems without permission.
In Tromml’s answer, defendants denied wrongdoing. The filing also denied that either Park or McCullough had any kind of confidentiality agreement with FeedStation.
While defendants admitted that Tromml accessed customer data from FeedStation’s website, they claim in their filed response that they did so with credentials provided by a customer, and that they were acting as its agent the entire time.
Few details of the resolution were released, other than that the agreement includes each party bearing its own respective costs including attorney fees.
In an email, McCullough declined to disclose settlement details.
“I can say our team is happy to have put this in the past and look forward to getting back to scaling Tromml,” she said. “To be clear to outside parties, Tromml is not under any restriction from any source that would prevent it from using its IP in any lawful manner and is confident it can provide all of the typical and necessary due diligence information in connection with any financing or change of control transaction.”
Linnane, in an email, also declined to disclose terms, saying that "the parties have reached an amicable resolution of all disputes."
FeedStation was represented by a group of attorneys from Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP, who did not respond to a request to comment. Tromml was represented by Neil Reimann of Parry Law, who also did not comment on the case.
