Market Data 
- Carlyle-backed Yipit added M Science, its CEO, and a former executive as defendants in its trade secrets lawsuit.
- M Science, owned by Jefferies, had more than a dozen salespeople use Yipit’s stolen information, the new filing says.
- A statement from M Science said that its rival’s claims are “absolutely meritless.”
Alternative-data giant Yipit laid out how damaging rival M Science’s “conspiracy” to steal its confidential information has been, according to new filings in New York federal court.
The new amended complaint, filed in the federal district court in Manhattan, says Carlyle-backed Yipit has churned dozens of customers — including investment managers such as hedge funds — as a result of the theft of its product and client information by two former employees.
M Science executives, including current CEO Michael Marrale, encouraged the theft, the complaint said. The new legal filing added Marrale, former chief revenue officer Valentin Roduit, and the Jefferies-owned company as defendants, as a recent motion from Yipit indicated it would.
The original Yipit lawsuit, from last October, rocked the alternative data industry, a growing subsector of the massive investment management space that caters primarily to hedge funds by providing them with insights gleaned from credit-card receipts, geolocation foot traffic, and web-scraping bots.
The original suit said two former Yipit employees, Alex Pinsky and Zach Emmett, brought proprietary information from their former firm to M Science. The new complaint includes screenshots of texts, Microsoft Teams messages, and Bloomberg chats between the two and others at M Science that show them discussing Yipit clients and products.
In a statement, Yipit said there’s evidence that “M Science has run a documented campaign to steal Yipit’s information to prop up its business.” Specifically, the complaint said Marrale was aware of the information Emmett supplied on the data sources Yipit used to create its Apple product as well as advice for its sales team on how to present the product to clients. M Science has its own rival Apple data product.
In one May text chain before Emmett left Yipit, Aaron Fuchs, an M Science salesperson, messaged saying he wished Emmett would stay at Yipit longer. Emmett responded saying “maybe there’s a comp plan where I am just a mole.” Emmett clarified in a second message: “For mscience.”
“Lol Rich Handler would pay your legal bills,” Fuchs responded, referring to Jefferies CEO.
“Yipit is very well aware that the statement regarding Mr. Handler was a sophomoric wisecrack made by a junior person who has never met Mr. Handler and whom Mr. Handler does not know,” a statement from M Science reads.
“The fact that Yipit added this tripe in their complaint underscores the absolutely meritless nature of their claims.”
Roduit, who no longer works at M Science, did not respond to requests for comment.
More to come
The legal battle between the two well-known alternative data brands got even nastier last week when M Science filed its own complaint against Yipit, accusing its rival of many of the same practices. Yipit has not yet responded to the complaint in court but called it “a meritless smokescreen” in a statement to Business Insider last week.
As for the original lawsuit, Yipit said it believes there’s more to uncover in the “conspiracy” that will implicate even more people at M Science. The new legal filing states it began to investigate Emmett “immediately” after he publicly announced he was joining M Science and found “smoking gun” text messages on his work laptop, which he returned months after he was instructed to. Yipit said it used data loss protection software Cyberhaven to recover various evidence from Emmett’s laptop.
The new complaint states that “more than a dozen M Science employees solicited and/or received Yipit’s information directly or indirectly from Mr. Emmett” — roughly a quarter of M Science’s sales force.
“Yipit cannot know, without discovery, just how far the conspiracy to misappropriate and use its information extended. But the information M Science provided so far indicates that the scheme included many M Science employees, including Mr. Marrale and other officers at the C-suite level, and that the highest echelons of M Science leadership were either aware of this conspiracy, or (in the case of Mr. Marrale, among many others) actively participated in it,” the new complaint reads.
Yipit questioned the rationale of different corporate decisions made by M Science over the past couple of years in the filing. The complaint references a BI report from 2023 on M Science’s change to its pricing model that increased the cost of its reports for its biggest clients, some of whom had to pay double.
Marrale, in an interview with BI in 2023, said that the decision was driven by new data sources, improved infrastructure, and a partnership with Databricks. Yipit’s complaint said the information its former salespeople provided M Science executives about its own client base — and the prices Yipit was charging them — paved the way for M Science to raise its own prices.
“These price increases could have seriously jeopardized M Science’s business and driven away its customers,” the complaint said.
“M Science’s willingness to make such a move suggests that it obtained detailed information about the pricing strategies of its primary competitor, Yipit—on information and belief, through the illicit disclosures of its departing employees—and adjusted accordingly.”
