The trade secrets war between Toptal and Andela was reported once, when Toptal sued in a New York state court and the technology press carried the fight. The war never ended. On 24 May 2024 the same case crossed into the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, where it has since grown satellite battles in Florida, a privilege war fought through two Florida courts, a witness hunt that reached the courts of the United Kingdom, and a timetable that carried it past its biggest deadline with the case still open.
The federal file, in a ReportsNG review of the court records, shows the federal case numbered 1:24-cv-04027 is not a second lawsuit at all. It is the 2021 state action, carried on the New York County Supreme Court docket as case 653677/2021, removed to federal court by the defendants themselves. Toptal filed the original complaint in June 2021 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, suing Andela and several of its own former executives and alleging theft of trade secrets in pursuit of a perfect clone of its business.
In that first complaint, Toptal alleged the former employees had reneged on confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-compete agreements, and accused Andela of interference with contract, unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets. Andela answered through its General Counsel, Kirsten Canton, who called the complaint wholly without merit and added that those who cannot innovate, litigate.
The removal notice carried the state record with it: the summons and complaint, both answers, a state court order of 16 May 2022 and an amended complaint. In federal court the defendants are Andela Inc. and Courtney Machi alone. Toptal’s claims, as summarised in a later federal order, are misappropriation of trade secrets, violation of the Defend Trade Secrets Act, unfair competition and tortious interference with contract against Andela, and breach of contract against Machi.
Toptal alleges, in the words recorded from its papers in a later federal court order, that Andela hired and deployed at least thirty former Toptal employees to create a new business model to compete unfairly with Toptal and poach its personnel, clients, and talent. Machi is identified in those papers as Andela’s Vice President of Product who once served as a Senior Product Manager for Toptal.
The Defend Trade Secrets Act is the federal weapon in the case. It lets a company whose secrets are taken sue in federal court for injunctions against further use and for the damages the misuse caused.
The first federal fight was over how precisely Toptal had to name its own secrets. In September 2024 the court applied a flexible reasonable particularity standard at the discovery stage and accepted Toptal’s narrative disclosure of about fifty pages as enough to proceed.
Toptal then reached outside the case for a man who had left it years before the Andela fight began. Breanden Beneschott served as Toptal’s Chief Operating Officer until Toptal terminated him in 2018, and he later became chief executive of Mechanism Ventures, the firm founded by Toptal’s former investor and adviser Denis Grosz. In the Andela case Toptal subpoenaed Beneschott for documents and communications relating to Andela, its founder Jeremy Johnson, Andela’s business strategies and personnel, and any assistance Beneschott or Mechanism Ventures gave Andela in soliciting Toptal’s personnel, talent and clients. Toptal alleges Johnson was Beneschott’s former roommate and Princeton classmate.
Beneschott produced the same mass of documents he had earlier produced in another Toptal lawsuit, counted by Toptal at 10,449 documents, with 205 further documents produced in answer to the Andela subpoena, and he withheld one document on attorney-client privilege. Toptal took the fight to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, in a miscellaneous case numbered 2:25-mc-13, moving to compel 271 more documents it said he was keeping back.
The documents Toptal chased in Florida were veterans of an older war. In the Nevada action, Toptal’s 2021 state case against Grosz and Mechanism Ventures, Beneschott had produced his papers under a Florida subpoena and withheld 358 of them on privilege. A Florida circuit court in Collier County threw out his privilege claims and ordered the documents produced. Florida’s Sixth District Court of Appeal reversed that order in April 2025, holding the trial court had erred by deciding privilege categorically without first inspecting the documents in private, and the state proceedings were stayed while the Nevada action sat on appeal.
In the Florida federal case, the court recorded that Toptal had described Beneschott, in broad brush strokes, as a man with an intent to just crush Toptal. The court was not moved. It held the documents had never been withheld under the Andela subpoena, never logged as privileged under it and never shown to be responsive to it, and on 26 February 2026 Magistrate Judge Nicholas P. Mizell denied the motion to compel and closed the Florida case.
The hunt for evidence crossed the Atlantic. On 27 October 2025, Magistrate Judge Jennifer E. Willis in New York granted Toptal’s renewed motion for a Letter of Request directed to the courts in the United Kingdom, under the Hague Convention on the taking of evidence abroad, to obtain testimony from a nonparty named Lilly Wollman. Toptal had first sought the letter in an unopposed motion aimed at testimony on 28 March 2025. The filings name her as a nonparty, and the papers examined for this report state no connection between her and either company.
The defendants struck back on the secrets themselves. Andela and Machi moved to compel Toptal to identify each alleged trade secret with particularity and to key every document in its Appendix A to the specific secret it supposedly contained. After oral argument in Courtroom 228 of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse in New York on 4 August 2026, Judge Willis denied the motion for the reasons stated on the record and directed the parties to order a transcript of the hearing.
What rides on the case is set by the same Act. A plaintiff that proves wilful and malicious misappropriation can win exemplary damages of up to double its actual loss, on top of its damages and its attorneys’ fees.
The timetable now governing the case was fixed by Judge Willis on 18 November 2025. Fact discovery closed on 13 March 2026 and expert discovery closed on 21 August 2026. Summary judgment and Daubert motions fell due on 20 October 2026, a date that has passed. Oppositions fall due on 22 December 2026 and replies on 22 January 2027.
