Shrikant Kunden, founder-director of Last Mile Digital Solutions, said Zippr has used his technology to develop solutions and win customers without permission.
To protect his rights, Shrikant Kunden has filed a criminal complaint against Delhi-based Indian Angel Network Services (IAN), Hyderabad-based Zippr and Gagan Aggarwal, incubator manager, IAN, with Pune Police, for allegedly misusing trade secrets.
The Pune Police has registered the FIR u/s420, 406, 34 of the IPC.
Shrikant Kunden, a serial inventor from Pune, has filed 4 patents in India in last 6 years.
Digital Location System (DLS), one of his patent-filed technologies, received 4th Prize in a national-level competition organized by the Government of India and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in 2012, among 650 contestants.
IAN, the largest angel funding company in India, approached Shrikant Kunden and expressed interest in funding this winning project.
Shrikant Kunden shared techno-functional-commercial documents of the project to formalize and initiate the funding process with IAN.
After a few months, a new company was incorporated in Hyderabad, Zippr with funding of Rs 6 crore from IAN.
Zippr was not available for comments. A press statement from Shrikant Kunden stated that Zippr has allegedly developed the same solution and started commercialising its services, allegedly referring to the documents that are intellectual property of Kunden.
Some of the enterprise customers of Zippr include Domino’s India, Thyrocare India, Planet Express, commonfloor.com, Carzcare, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, Karnataka’s 108 emergency service and municipal corporations.
A few months back, there were reports that Amazon was in discussions with Zippr for investing $6 mn in the company.
Shrikant has been working on this concept for several months. It would be very unethical on the part of anyone, the investment group or another developer, if the fruits of the hard work done by Shrikant are usurped so blatantly. I hope an amicable solution is reached.