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Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.
The company alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.
The suit accused the three defendants of attempting to poach executives and developers from their former company and "plunder Palantir's valuable intellectual property." Palantir said the defendants were entrusted with the company's "crown jewels," including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.
Percepta denied using any of Palantir's confidential information, calling the case "baseless," and said in a statement that the company was "cherry-picking out-of-context soundbites." It added that "Palantir does not own the AI transformation space, which is massive and constantly evolving."
The statement continued: "This is the latest in Palantir's effort to use fear tactics to bully ex-employees out of innovating with applied AI."
Claims of recruitment efforts and internal messages
Cohen and Radha Jain were previously senior engineers at Palantir. They were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, and both denied the initial allegations in a November filing. They also agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.
Palantir said that Hirsh Jain, who was responsible for the company's health-care portfolio before resigning in August 2024, had engaged in an "aggressive campaign" to recruit other employees to join Percepta. The suit said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees. A message allegedly written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, "I'm down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they're at their maximum richness." The complaint says Radha Jain wrote another message saying, "God, thinking about poaching is so fun."
Allegations involving confidential documents
Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information and downloaded files onto her personal phone. The company claimed, "At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit."
Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.
