A person alleged in a lawsuit to be a company spy who stole secrets and techniques from a Bay Space expertise agency on behalf of its arch rival says in a courtroom submitting that the plan was hatched as a James Bond-style operation.
Heavyweight workforce-management software program startups Rippling and Deel are locked in a authorized battle over claims by Rippling that Deel cultivated a spy in its Irish workplace who was caught with a “honeypot” lure.
The San Francisco firms, based on studies on their valuations, are each “decacorns” value $10 billion or extra, and have made their rivalry public by dueling bulletins mentioning one another by title.
Rippling sued Deel final month in San Francisco U.S. District Courtroom, describing the alleged mole solely as “D.S.” for “Deel spy.”
Now, a person named Keith O’Brien has claimed in a sworn affidavit in Irish courtroom that he was the spy, and that the skullduggery included coded communications like “send that watch to London” that would seem in a Bond film.
Deel didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark. A Deel spokesperson earlier denied “all legal wrongdoing.”
O’Brien, based on the affidavit he made beneath oath, had labored at Rippling’s Dublin, Eire workplace since July 2023 on world payroll and compliance merchandise, and sought to leap ship to Deel in March of final yr. He went by the applying course of however was rejected, the affidavit stated.
In September, whereas nonetheless at Rippling however searching for consulting work with Deel, O’Brien contacted Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz and advised him he was considering of leaving Rippling to give attention to consulting. Bouaziz instructed a telephone name, and the 2 talked, the affidavit stated.
“I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond,” O’Brien’s affidavit stated. “He said he would offer me a monetary reward if I agreed to spy on Rippling for Deel.”
O’Brien claimed he agreed to work as Bouaziz’s undercover agent inside Rippling, for $5,000 euros a month, equal to about $5,400 in U.S. {dollars}.
After his first cost, through an app, Bouaziz’s father and Deel chief monetary officer Philippe Bouaziz switched the transactions to cryptocurrency to make them tougher to hint, O’Brien claimed within the affidavit.
“When it was time for me to be paid, I would send a picture of a watch to the payment chat, and Philippe would say ‘send that watch to London,’” the affidavit claimed. “Then he would say ‘the buyer is happy.’ I understood this to mean that Alex, the buyer of Rippling’s confidential information, was happy with my services and the information I had sent him, and that I would be getting paid.”
Alex Bouaziz, particularly concerned about Rippling’s growth methods, and details about gross sales, advertising and clients, would inform O’Brien what phrases to seek for in Rippling’s inner messaging system, the affidavit claimed.
However in the meantime, based on the lawsuit, Rippling had been trying to find a suspected leaker, and located suspicious searches on its inner messaging system. The corporate started monitoring the habits of D.S. — allegedly O’Brien — the lawsuit stated. Rippling discovered that the spy downloaded details about its potential purchasers greater than 1,300 instances, together with viewing and downloading buyer data lots of of instances, the lawsuit claimed.
Rippling laid the honeypot lure, the lawsuit stated.
Early final month, Rippling’s chief lawyer despatched a letter to Deel’s board chair, its head of U.S. authorized affairs, and a lawyer at a legislation agency utilized by Deel, the lawsuit stated. Included within the letter was a made-up screenshot of a message from Rippling’s chief income officer Matt Plank referring to a non-existent Slack channel named “d-defectors” — to point it was to be used by former Deel staff working at Rippling.
It was, based on the lawsuit, “bait.” Deel allegedly snapped it up. Inside hours after the letter was despatched, D.S. started looking out Slack for the non-existent channel, and for Plank’s title, the lawsuit claimed.
On March 12, Rippling obtained a courtroom order in Eire “directing seizure and inspection of D.S.’s phone,” the lawsuit stated. The courtroom ordered that the person should give his telephone to an impartial lawyer, in preparation for a listening to to find out whether or not Rippling may entry the gadget’s knowledge, the lawsuit stated.
The lawyer confirmed up at Rippling’s Dublin workplace, gave the order to D.S. and advised him he should hand over his telephone. The lawsuit alleged D.S. fled to a rest room and locked himself inside, “seemingly in order to delete evidence.”
What grew to become of D.S. and his telephone after he allegedly “stormed out of the office and fled the scene” was not made clear within the lawsuit.
Nevertheless, the affidavit purportedly fills within the blanks.
O’Brien claimed that on the finish of February, Alex Bouaziz advised him to seek for “d-defectors,” however quickly after working the question despatched him a message to not do the search as a result of it was a “trap.” O’Brien responded that he had already searched the time period, and Bouaziz responded with a profanity, however then advised him to not fear, and afterward, continued to press O’Brien to ship data on Rippling, the affidavit alleged.
On March 14, the lawyer appeared with the courtroom order, and requested the place O’Brien’s gadgets had been, the affidavit stated. “Although I had my phone in my pocket, I lied,” O’Brien stated within the affidavit, including that he then went to the lavatory and erased all of the contents on his telephone through a reset perform.
Deel, he claimed, proposed sending him and his household to Dubai, and would protect him from authorized legal responsibility and reward him financially if he stored quiet.
As an alternative, he resolved to show in opposition to his alleged spymasters, the affidavit stated.
“I decided to cooperate,” he stated, “after I got a text from a friend on March 25, 2025 saying, ‘the truth will set you free.’”
