An artificial intelligence-powered weather simulation startup has sued a rival company in California federal court, claiming a consultant took its source code and used it to found the competitor.
Atmo Inc. said in a Thursday lawsuit that Koki Mashita misappropriated technical and trade secrets when he worked as a consultant and used them to launch Aeolus Labs in December.
According to the complaint, Mashita took an overview of Atmo's customers, the source code for a portion of the company's programs for weather and atmospheric simulations, and over 200 other files.
Atmo was founded in 2019 and said it is a leading company in bringing AI to meteorology, which is useful in forecasting and "weather modification," according to the complaint. The company said its customers include governments, militaries and corporations around the globe.
Mashita was a consultant for the company in the summer of 2024, according to the suit. Mashita was introduced to Atmo's co-founder Alexander Levy in 2022 when Mashita was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and the company brought him on as an intern that year, the suit said. In that role, Mashita worked on software engineering and had access to confidential company documents, the suit said, noting that Mashita signed a mutual nondisclosure agreement during that time.
Mashita's consultant position with Atmo spanned from June to August 2024, during which time he worked on the company's source code, the suit said.
At a business conference in November, an entrepreneur unaffiliated with either Atmo or Aeolus told Levy that Mashita had told him he planned to start his own company focused on AI weather simulations, the suit said. Mashita ultimately confirmed as much to Levy, and later that month, assured Atmo that he would not use its trade secrets or confidential information in the course of business, according to the complaint.
Atmo conducted a forensic search of Mashita's system access logs from his time at the company and "was shocked to discover that, throughout the summer, Mr. Mashita had accessed a substantial number of Atmo files that were unrelated to his products as an intern or consultant" and that he'd continued to access those files after leaving, the suit alleged.
After contacting Mashita about the findings, Mashita's attorney responded that he had retained Atmo files on his computer but would not disclose trade secrets and was not competing with Atmo, according to the suit.
In May, an Atmo investor forwarded Levy an email saying Mashita was meeting with senior officials of a company that is one of Atmo's largest clients, the suit said. Two other customers also said they'd been contacted by Mashita, and one said Mashita had admitted his intent to use his insights from working at Atmo to create new systems at Aeolus, according to the suit.
Aeolus has received at least $12 million in venture capital funding using methods developed by Atmo, the suit said.
A representative for Atmo declined to comment Monday, and Aeolus and Mashita could not immediately be reached for comment.
Atmo is represented by L. Kieran Kieckhefer, Joseph Gorman, Ilissa Samplin, and Charlotte Jacobsen of
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
Counsel information was not immediately available for Mashita and Aeolus on Monday.
The case is Atmo Inc. v. Mashita et al., case number
3:25-cv-05652, in the
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
--Editing by Melissa Treolo.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.