Palantir sues ex-engineers for allegedly stealing documents to create ‘copycat business’
Palantir (PLTR) on Thursday sued two of its former senior engineers, accusing them of stealing information and documents in order to create a “competing copycat business” called Percepta AI.
The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court, alleges that Radha Jain and Joanna Cohen “exploited” the access they had to Palantir’s “confidential information, proprietary methodologies, and customer relationships” in order to create a “copycat ‘version’ of Palantir.”
They did this despite knowing that it violated the terms of their contract, the complaint states.
“Their misconduct only recently came to light after their imitation business emerged from ‘stealth’ mode, professing to have developed in eleven months the same product and business that took Palantir decades to develop and while Jain, its co-founder, was party to a non-competition agreement with Palantir,” the lawsuit said.
The company indicated that it conducted a “forensic investigation” that uncovered the alleged theft of the documents and confidential information.
Palantir claims that Percepta, an AI integration company, is targeting the same global customer base that it does, including healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. It also notes that the startup poached 10 former Palantir employees, including Hirsh Jain, who is co-founder and CEO of Percepta.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Jain worked at Palantir for five years, leaving the company in November 2024. Cohen’s LinkedIn profile shows that she worked at Palantir just two months shy of five years before departing in February.
Based on her LinkedIn profile, Jain appears to have co-founded Percepta a month after she left Palantir.
However, it wasn’t until this month that General Catalyst, a venture capital firm, issued a press release announcing the launch of Percepta. The website lists Anthropic and Amazon’s (AMZN) AWS as founding partners.
Palantir alleges that by not updating their LinkedIn profiles earlier, Jain and Cohen "purposefully hid the fact they were secretly and unfairly competing” with their former employer in “brazen violation of their contractual obligations.”
In its complaint, Palantir claims that the two former engineers “were far from rank-and-file employees.”
“Jain designed and built Palantir’s flagship software, and Cohen interacted directly with some of Palantir’s largest and most important customers to configure specific AI software solutions to increase the efficiency of their businesses and operations,” it said.
The lawsuit also alleges that the day after Cohen had submitted her resignation, she sent herself a Slack message containing an attachment with “highly confidential documents, including a detailed healthcare revenue cycle management diagram; an internal healthcare demonstration planning framework; and a draft statement of work outlining how Palantir would deploy AIP to solve a customer’s problem.”
She then allegedly accessed or downloaded these documents on her phone.
Palantir also accuses Cohen of accessing marketing materials for “industries she had no involvement with” during her time at the company.