The Bitter Fintech Feud That Stretches From Silicon Valley to Moscow

The seemingly mundane world of human resources management startups is not the place you’d expect to see cutthroat corporate blood sport, battles linked to global geopolitics, and questions about whether companies took on the wrong customers to boost growth. But Deel and Rippling are hardly ordinary startups.

Their feud spilled into open view earlier this year in a Florida courtroom. A court-appointed receiver to a fraudulent investment scheme accused Deel in a complaint of becoming a magnet for people moving money into Russia and making it easy for “bad actors” to “do business with our nation’s enemies in violation of national sanctions.”