The Justice Department is reportedly investigating allegations that human resources company Deel recruited a spy inside rival firm Rippling.
The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California sent out grand jury subpoenas seeking information about the alleged plot, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday (Jan. 23), citing unsealed court documents.
A spokeswoman for Deel told the WSJ that the company is not aware of a criminal investigation but is willing to cooperate with authorities, according to the report.
The two companies have been engaged in a legal battle, according to their blog posts over the past year.
Rippling said in a March 2025 blog post that it sued Deel in a federal court in California, alleging that Deel cultivated a Rippling employee to become a corporate spy. The lawsuit alleged that the spy then used Rippling’s systems to find and steal confidential business information, in part by searching the term “Deel” in the system on average 23 times a day over a four-month period to gather information about Deel customers that were considering switching to Rippling, according to the post.
Deel said in an April 2025 blog post that it filed a civil lawsuit against Rippling in Delaware, alleging that Rippling attacked Deel and other competitors, as well as former employees, through legal action, frivolous regulatory complaints and misleading marketing tactics.
In a June 2025 update to that post, Deel said it had uncovered evidence and would prove in court that Rippling employed a “competitive intelligence manager” who used a fake corporate name to infiltrate Deel’s platform 58 times and steal proprietary documents.
Rippling said in June 2025 blog post that it filed an amended complaint alleging that Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz was the chief architect of the plan to use a corporate spy to steal Rippling’s confidential trade secrets. The amended complaint also alleged that Deel’s plan included not only Rippling but a total of at least four companies, per the post.
Rippling said in a November 2025 blog post that unsealed documents showed that Deel funded payments to the person who stole trade secrets from Rippling and that Deel recorded this payment as an expense.
