CEO of fintech app Eco alleges that Y Combinator-backed Pebble copied its business model, materials

He also alleges that Phadnis asked detailed questions about Eco’s backend under the guise of looking for employment and that multiple aspects of Pebble’s product and marketing language are essentially copy-pasted from Eco.TechCrunch covered the news earlier today that Pebble, which participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, raised $6.2 million in seed funding from YC itself alongside LightShed Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Montage Ventures, Soma Capital and angel investors.On its website, Pebble, founded last year, calls itself “the first app that pays you to save, spend, and send your money — all in one balance.” It launched with two core products — a 5% APY interest offering for customer cash deposits, and a 5% cash back offering when customers spend at its partner merchants, which include Uber, Amazon and Chipotle, Pebble CEO Aaron Bai said. But I don’t really feel like going and reaching out to them in advance of making some public statements at this juncture,” Bromberg told TechCrunch in a phone interview.Bromberg’s Twitter thread includes alleged screenshots of internal customer records, which he says show multiple attempts on behalf of the Pebble co-founders to gain access to Eco. Bromberg told TechCrunch that Eco was able to link these submissions to Bai and Phadnis because they were “repeated submissions with overlapping information,” such as the same phone number and email being used numerous times under different names, including Bromberg’s own name as well as “Andy Bro Burger” and “Poopy Bromberg.”Then we discovered more:Eco’s sophisticated funnel has paths built for every persona.We found many submissions trying to discover every path… all connected to the copycats.(shoutout @jeremycaius) pic.twitter.com/wFdbvhQuh9— Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) May 23, 2022Bromberg also alleges that while Eco was onboarding Phadnis as a beta customer, Phadnis inquired in detail about Eco’s costs and technology, saying he was a computer science geek interested in backend operations.