Legal Fight over GM’s Acquisition of Cruise Automation
Cruise is a three-year-old company that creates technology to enable driverless cars. Early on the company built hardware that would retrofit existing Audis, but last year it shifted to software that enables autonomous cars to operate in cities. Mr. Vogt sold his videogame streaming service to Amazon.com Inc. for roughly $1 billion in 2014.
General Motors agreed to acquire Cruise earlier this year in a deal valued at more than $1 billion in cash and stock, according to people familiar with the details. That deal has yet to close, but GM has touted the partnership widely and Cruise has posted a number of jobs on its website while promising to deploy the world’s largest fleet of driverless cars.
Now Cruise and Mr. Vogt have filed a lawsuit against Mr. Guillory for allegedly claiming an equity interest in Cruise that they say he isn’t entitled to. The lawsuit claims Mr. Vogt consulted briefly with Mr. Guillory soon after Mr. Vogt founded Cruise in 2013, but ultimately the two decided to go their separate ways.
The lawsuit says Mr. Guillory was listed on Cruise’s application to the startup incubator Y Combinator in 2013, but says Mr. Vogt interviewed with the Y Combinator partners on his own. It claims Mr. Guillory never wrote any code or created any technology for Cruise, and that he was never issued any stock options.
Mr. Guillory filed a countersuit against Cruise and Mr. Vogt Thursday. According to the countersuit, Mr. Guillory earned a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from University of Texas at Austin and was working on driverless car technology long before he met Mr. Vogt in 2013 and the pair applied to Y Combinator together.
Mr. Guillory declined to comment further through a spokesman.
Y Combinator president Sam Altman posted Cruise’s lawsuit online Wednesday along with a blog post calling Mr. Guillory’s claim “completely baseless and opportunistic." He also said “it obviously comes at a bad time for the company with the merger still pending."
“Mr. Guillory’s baseless allegations have also caused an unnecessary and damaging delay in the sale of Cruise to General Motors," states the lawsuit. “Time is truly of the essence in the highly competitive and frenetic race in the development of autonomous technology. Any continued delay damages Plaintiffs."
A General Motors spokesman said, “We are aware of the complaint filed by Cruise Automation and support their efforts to bring the matter to a prompt conclusion. We expect our acquisition to close on schedule in the second quarter." Gautham Nagesh/The Wall Street Journal