Andela has been sued by Toptal LLC, an online staffing platform for highly skilled developers. The lawsuit was filed last week and alleges that Andela hired away Toptal execs and is essentially seeking to clone the company, according to court records.
Toptal curates highly skilled independent contractors such as engineers, software developers, designers, finance experts, and product managers. It was founded in 2010 and serves more than 1,000 clients in more than a dozen countries, according to the company.
The case was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Toptal is suing Andela and several former Toptal executives for interference with contract, unfair competition, misappropriation of trade secrets as well as breaches of confidentiality, nonsolicitation and non-compete agreements.
The lawsuit statement partially read that “While some lateral movement between competitors might be expected, Andela’s campaign has improper motives and utilizes improper means to expeditiously and expediently recreate Toptal’s model using key former Toptal personnel,”
Andela responded to the lawsuit in a statement.
“The complaint is wholly without merit,” Andela General Counsel Kirsten Canton said in a statement. “But those who cannot innovate, litigate. We are focused on building the first Andela, a global marketplace for premier engineering talent. We will defend our company and our colleagues vigorously.”
Toptal in the lawsuit cited examples of what it said were efforts that contravened do-not-compete contracts and other efforts it said were improper.
ALSO READ: Andela Begins Global Expansion targeting Engineering Talent outside Africa
In April this year, Andela went global and announced that Applications from qualified engineers outside of Africa had increased by more than 750% in the past six months. In March alone, more than 30% of Andela inbound engineer applications came from outside of Africa, half of which came from Latin America, creating significant increases in time-zone coverage for Andela clients. Even with the fast global growth, Africa is also expanding rapidly, with 500% growth in the past six months.
In one example, a former Toptal executive sent an email regarding a wine tasting invitation, according to the lawsuit. Toptal alleges the former executive mass emailed the invitation to his contact list and that the company found out about the effort because the executive’s own former Toptal email was not removed from the exported contact list.
The company also alleged efforts to recruit Toptal freelance professionals among other allegations.
