Rippling alleges Deel CEO led corporate espionage ring targeting competitors
Amended Rippling lawsuit alleges Deel’s Alex Bouaziz oversaw theft of trade secrets from four competitors.
In another escalation of Silicon Valley’s most bitter HR tech rivalry, a newly amended federal complaint filed by Rippling accuses Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz of personally orchestrating a covert corporate espionage operation that infiltrated at least four companies, including Rippling, in an effort to unlawfully accelerate Deel’s growth.
The complaint, filed in federal court on Thursday, describes what it calls the “Bouaziz Racketeering Enterprise,” a secretive and tightly controlled network allegedly overseen by Bouaziz and his father, Deel CFO and board chairman Philippe Bouaziz. According to the filing, the group recruited insiders from rival companies to steal confidential data, including CRMs and sales pipelines, which were then weaponized “in real time” by Deel’s leadership.
“This case is about a criminal syndicate that operated from the shadows of a multibillion-dollar technology company - Deel,” the complaint states.
The legal filing, which includes text messages, photographs, and forensic evidence, paints a picture of a high-level cover-up involving burner phones, crypto payments, and attempted data deletion. It alleges that Deel’s top brass, including COO Dan Westgarth, were directly involved in contacting and coordinating with a corporate spy embedded inside Rippling, named in court documents as Keith O’Brien.
One internal message allegedly shows Bouaziz reacting almost instantly to a Slack message posted by Rippling’s team about a sales prospect. Within hours, that prospect reportedly received a WhatsApp message from a French number identifying the sender as “Deel CEO.” According to the founder of the target company, the timing “scared TSO” of him.
O’Brien ultimately turned over his phone and devices to an independent forensic investigator. The complaint includes images and logs showing crypto payments from Philippe Bouaziz’s blockchain.com account to O’Brien, and details a surreal twist: lawyers for Deel, apparently unaware that O’Brien had confessed, attempted to call the burner phone, already in the possession of the investigator, just hours before a scheduled court appearance.
When those calls were made, the investigator captured images and logged the evidence. Later, one of Deel’s attorneys allegedly tried to delete the call records manually, despite knowing they were already set to auto-delete. That deletion was also observed by the investigator.
Rippling’s filing claims that the Bouaziz network didn’t just target Rippling. At least three other companies, described as direct Deel competitors in the Employer of Record (EOR) market, were infiltrated. In one case, the complaint alleges an entire CRM was stolen. The document claims that other major EOR players have “uncovered eerily similar conduct by Deel or its associates.”
The amended complaint suggests that this is just the beginning. It states that additional evidence will be produced once subpoenas are issued and claims that one major EOR competitor has already reported Deel to U.S. federal law enforcement.
"A month after conceding the weaknesses in its far-fetched claims against Deel, Rippling again swung and missed, as its amendment fails to correct any of the myriad fatal flaws in its original complaint," a Deel spokesperson told CTech. "All Rippling can do is rehash the claims from the same witness who has provided testimony pursuant to a cooperation agreement that Rippling refuses to disclose. By contrast, our claims are based on incontrovertible evidence that Rippling accessed our systems on 58 separate occasions and that Rippling stole a number of specific proprietary documents that are critical to our business. We are winning in the marketplace, we stand by our own lawsuit, and we will be vindicated in court as well."
On Tuesday, Deel’s newest court filing accused its rival of running a coordinated and illegal corporate espionage campaign to copy its flagship product and close a widening competitive gap.
In the amended complaint filed in California, Deel alleged that Rippling, acting under the direction of CEO Parker Conrad, embedded a spy in its customer platform for six months under a false identity, systematically siphoning proprietary product data and internal documentation. The filing claims that Rippling’s actions were not rogue but part of an institutional effort to replicate Deel’s global Employer of Record (EOR) offering.
