Virtual medical assistant developer MedWhat has hit back at investors including Stanford University and its StartX Fund with allegations they broke the law on eight separate counts.

US-based virtual medical assistant developer MedWhat has moved a countersuit on investors including Stanford University and Stanford-StartX Fund regarding allegations including fraud, Analytics Insight reported yesterday. MedWhat has filed in the Superior Court of California County of San Francisco on eight counts – breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, securities fraud, wire fraud, unfair business practice, injurious falsehood, intellectual property (IP) infringement and blackmail. MedWhat is developing a medical chatbot that advises the user on remedies for health conditions based on an artificial intelligence-powered assessment. It hopes to eventually build a platform that matches human-level intelligence in medicine. Stanford-StartX Fund filed against MedWhat in April 2018 alongside fellow plaintiffs Caixa Capital, Regent Capital Ventures and Startcaps Ventures but it has never publicised the nature of its charges. MedWhat’s countersuit suggests the court’s bid to broker an amicable solution by forwarding the dispute to a mediation panel may have failed. It will argue Stanford University, Stanford-StartX Fund and other cross-complainants succumbed to conflicts of interest, unethical behaviour, lying and fraud. Amongst a series of allegations, MedWhat cites records from deals database CrunchBase that show Stanford University and fellow cross-complainant Magic Stone Alternative Investments both backed rival medical assistant developer Sensely without disclosing the move during due diligence. The investors are then alleged to have fraudulently used MedWhat’s proprietary information to support their Sensely investments. Another MedWhat investor, VC firm IncWell, is accused of enticing some engineers to leave for a competitor without MedWhat’s knowledge. IncWell is also supposed to have committed wire fraud by impersonating MedWhat chief executive Arturo Devesa in an effort to gain illegal access to financial information from MedWhat’s bank account with First Republic Bank. MedWhat claims all the plaintiffs breached their convertible note contracts and committed securities fraud by obstructing the notes’ conversion in a qualifying financing round. IncWell and Stanford allegedly convinced other MedWhat investors to side against Devesa and refrain from exercising their conversion rights. Regent Capital and its partner Ling Yang are accused of misleading MedWhat regarding a series A commitment it made before backing out of the round altogether. MedWhat will argue Regent feigned interest to gain access to MedWhat’s IP and information for a competing investment in China. Spain-based Caixa Capital allegedly backed MedWhat acerbically so that it could garner access to venture capital grants from the Spanish government. MedWhat’s court documents purport that Caixa’s documents and financial information on MedWhat were erased upon the departure of the partner responsible for…

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