Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.
In the suit, Palantir 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.
Palantir and Percepta didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
The three defendants are accused of attempting to "poach" executives and developers from their former company and "plunder Palantir's valuable intellectual property."
Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company's healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.
Palantir said the defendants were "entrusted" with the company's "crown jewels," including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.
The former employees "brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition," the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.
The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an "aggressive campaign" to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.
An alleged message 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 Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, "God thinking about poaching is so fun."
Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company's stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.
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, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.
"At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit," Palantir said in the filing.
Among other things, 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.