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Carmel-based software firm Max Minds LLC has reached a settlement in its legal dispute with a former business partner, Ashland, Virginia-based Triangle Experience Group Inc.
Max Minds was launched in 2019 by serial tech entrepreneur Brandon Fischer. The company does business as Alleo, which is also the name of its core product—an online meeting platform that allows users to share content and collaborate virtually. The Alleo platform was previously called Haptic.
Max Minds and Triangle, a government contractor, had signed a joint venture agreement in January 2020 to sell the platform to government customers and share the revenue from those sales. But by 2023 that agreement had soured, and each party filed a lawsuit in which it accused the other of violating the business agreement.
Triangle initially filed its lawsuit in December 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In April 2024, the case was transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
In its complaint, Triangle alleged that it had a joint venture agreement with Max Minds to develop and co-own Haptic for government and commercial use but that Max Minds created a defective product and refused to share sales revenue. In response to Triangle’s allegations, Max Minds said it was the sole owner of the Haptic; and that Triangle falsely represented itself as a developer of the product and failed to share sales revenue.
Then, in May 2024, Max Minds filed its own lawsuit against Triangle. In that suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Max Minds alleged that Triangle had broken confidentiality and usage agreements by filing to protect Haptic’s source code and by making unauthorized copies of the product and passing it off as Triangle’s own product using different names.
According to court records, the parties reached a settlement and the court dismissed both cases with prejudice, meaning that the complaints cannot be refiled at a later date.
Triangle’s lawsuit against Max Minds closed on Aug. 14, and Max Minds’ lawsuit against Triangle closed Aug. 19.
Details of the settlement were not disclosed, and Fischer declined to comment on the outcome of the cases.
Max Minds’ lead counsel in its dispute with Triangle was Joel Rothman, the Boca Raton, Florida-based managing partner of SRip Law, a firm focused on intellectual property law.
Rothman provided a brief prepared statement to IBJ: “The matter was resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties.”
Triangle’s legal counsel was Richard D. Kelley of Arlington, Virginia-based Bean Kinney & Korman PC. Kelley did not immediately respond to messages from IBJ seeking comment.
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