The co-founders of data infrastructure startup Deck are being sued by the owners of their former company, Flinks, for allegedly violating a non-compete agreement.
The lawsuit alleges that Leboeuf and Lavoie gradually “disengaged” themselves from running the startup they built, despite their executive roles.
National Bank and its subsidiary Flinks filed a lawsuit in the Québec Superior Court on Dec. 3 claiming that Yves-François Leboeuf and Frédérick Lavoie, the co-founders of Flinks, breached their non-compete agreement through the activities of their new startup, Deck. As first reported by La Presse, the bank alleges that Leboeuf and Lavoie started building Deck after Flinks sold a majority stake to National Bank in 2021, and misrepresented their commercial intentions, which the lawsuit alleges ultimately compete with those of Flinks.
National Bank is demanding $5.7 million CAD from the defendants, through repayment of any gains they made in alleged violation of the non-compete and through a write-down of Flinks shares they repurchased last year. The lawsuit asks for Deck to cease commercial activities that have to do with financial data aggregation (which is Flinks’ main product focus).
The lawsuit alleges that, starting in 2023, Leboeuf and Lavoie gradually “disengaged” themselves from running the startup they built, despite their executive roles. It also claims that the then-executives failed to provide a direction to Flinks, and when they did, it wasn’t aligned with the subsidiary’s interests.
“We have acted with full transparency towards National Bank and Flinks from the outset and hold explicit written authorizations that directly contradict the allegations being made against us,” the co-founders claimed in an email. “Those written authorizations were provided when National Bank and Flinks’ current CEO had a full understanding of Deck’s projected activities.”
National Bank did not comment, saying that the matter was before the courts.
RELATED: Flinks co-founders trade open banking for open utility with new startup Deck
Leboeuf and Lavoie co-founded the open banking and data aggregation platform Flinks in 2016. The Flinks API began by connecting consumer banking information with FinTech platforms without screen-scraping, competing with American intermediaries like Plaid. Flinks raised a total of $19 million before it was acquired by National Bank in 2021, and has since expanded through a litany of enterprise partnerships.
Montréal-based Deck, co-founded by Lavoie, Leboeuf, and two other ex-Flinks employees, develops an application programming interface (API) for businesses to track metrics like energy consumption by making private utility data easily accessible. When it raised its seed round last fall, the co-founders told BetaKit that it fixes corporate inefficiencies by providing the infrastructure to compile data from all kinds of private, user-protected accounts.
Deck has raised $16.5 million USD ($22.7 million CAD) since its founding in 2024 from investors including Toronto’s Golden Ventures, San Francisco’s Better Tomorrow Ventures, and Montréal’s Luge Capital. The startup was in development while the co-founders were still at Flinks throughout 2024, and officially launched alongside the seed round announcement in October.
Image courtesy PiggyBank Canada under license CC BY 2.0.