Lusha President Assaf Eisentsein and CEO Yoni Tserruya
Israeli unicorn Lusha is being sued for as much as 35% of the company’s shares. The suit was filed in Tel Aviv district court by several of the company’s investors like Oren Abekasis against Lusha founders Assaf Eisenstein, his wife Anat Eisenstein, and Yoni Tserruyan alleging that they worked to defraud them out of the plaintiff’s fair share of the profits. Plus Ventures venture capital fund is also one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
Lusha, the crowdsourced data community for B2B sales and marketing professionals, only just became a unicorn last November when it raised $205 million in a Series B fundraising round that gave the company a $1.5 billion valuation. But such a valuation represents only an estimate based on what investors are willing to pay for a percentage of a company. A lawsuit such as this, should it have merits and move forward, could scare off new investors and lead to a drop in Lusha’s value on paper.
The plaintiff’s in the suit assert that they provided not only a great deal of money in investments for Lusha, but that they also mentored Assaf Eisenstein on how to run a company. Globes reports that the suit states that the plaintiffs, “continued to invest their money and devote resources to the company in response to Assaf Eisenstein’s requests, while he worked in the dark and behind their backs, along with his wife, in order to dispossess, oust and exclude the plaintiffs, and steal the venture and product in full from the plaintiffs, and the rest of the company’s investors.”
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The plaintiffs say that Assaf Eisenstein misrepresented company matters to them while he worked behind their backs to push them out of Lusha. They further accuse Assaf Eisenstein of secretly transferring the new tech developed by Lusha to his wife’s the Neta Eisenstein company.
Founded in 2016 by company president Assaf Eisentsein and CEO Yoni Tserruya, Lusha helps business professionals establish a fast and true connection with their leads, contacts, and candidates.
Lusha’s cloud-based platform enables sales professionals and teams to quickly access enterprise-grade solutions for identifying their ideal target buyer and gaining data-driven insights into who they approach as a potential client, when they approach them, and why. Through ongoing validation and enrichment of its database, community members enable Lusha to give the most reliable data possible.
