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Fishers-based tech firm Arrive AI Inc. is suing a former consultant whom it accuses of sabotaging the company’s efforts to sign a deal with a leading logistics company.
The defendants in the lawsuit are Myron Wright of Louisville and his company, Wright Flyer Consulting Group Inc. The case was filed Oct. 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Arrive launched in 2019 and became a publicly held company earlier this year. The company has secured multiple patents for its autonomous delivery system, which allows drones to deliver parcels to and from temperature-controlled secure “smart mailboxes” that the company calls Arrive Points.
Arrive is unusually small for a publicly traded company. At the end of last year, the company had seven full-time employees and another 15 part-time contract employees. In July, the company announced its plans to hire another 40 or so employees, tripling its employee count.
The company booked its first-ever revenue in the second quarter of this year: $90,725—most of that from Greenfield-based health system Hancock Health. But Arrive has big ambitions for its future, and in its complaint the company says it is “on the brink of losing what could be a multibillion dollar deal” with an unnamed logistics company because of Wright’s actions.
Court records indicate that attorney Peter French of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLC is representing Arrive, but no attorney is yet listed as representing Wright. Reached by phone, Wright declined to comment on the lawsuit or say whether he has hired an attorney.
In October 2022, the lawsuit says, Arrive signed an agreement with Wright and his firm to help build a relationship with a prospective logistics company that Arrive wanted to land as a customer.
The lawsuit calls this effort Project Astro. The lawsuit describes Project Astro’s target as “one of the top logistics companies in the world” and says that Wright formerly worked for the unnamed company.
As a consultant, Wright participated in Arrive company meetings and strategy sessions and “provided helpful information and feedback to Arrive as it developed its [autonomous last mile] delivery system and began marketing it to potential customers, including Project Astro’s target customer,” the lawsuit alleges.
Arrive alleges that it had sent product samples to Project Astro’s prospective customer for testing and feedback and was “on the brink of finalizing an agreement to memorialize Project Astro.”
Arrive compensated Wright for his work via both cash and company shares, and as of Jan. 2, 2025, he held 15,057 shares of the company, the lawsuit says. (As of June 30, there were more than 33 million shares of common stock issued for Arrive AI.)
But after Arrive terminated Wright’s consulting agreement in January, the lawsuit alleges, Wright “began interfering with Arrive’s business, customer relationships, and shareholder relationships,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit accuses Wright of, among other things, hiring the unnamed logistics company’s departing employees and directing them not to work with Arrive; and of “secretly usurping Arrive’s business opportunities, strategies, and valuable property, and using these assets to aid Arrive’s competitors and/or his own purposes.”
“I would say the fact that we are bringing an action, on its face, should state that we feel we have been wronged,” Arrive founder and CEO Dan O’Toole told IBJ in a written statement, “and it is always our position to steadfastly and zealously protect our interests.”
In its complaint, Arrive is asking the court to grant an injunction that would require Wright to immediately stop using Arrive’s trade secrets and to return or destroy any materials that contain these trade secrets.
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