When executives at Valencell, a North Carolina-based tech company, agreed to meet Apple researchers in 2013 to discuss the heart-rate sensor technology they had developed for mobile fitness trackers, they probably envisioned a potentially lucrative partnership with one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
Apple was, at the time, believed to be creating a watch that would incorporate the technology used in its iPhones and iPads. Any deal incorporating Valencell’s fitness technology could be particularly profitable for the seven-year-old company so Valencell was all too eager to help. But after a series of meetings at which Valencell demonstrated its technology to Apple, no contract was ever offered and the tech giant, Valencell alleges, disappeared.
Yet when the Apple Watch was unveiled, Valencell claims the product contained the exact functions that it had been showing to Apple — and Valencell has filed a lawsuit to that effect. The lawsuit, filed in January at federal court in North Carolina, also alleges that Apple employees who were working on developing the watch used fake names to download publicly available white papers from their website detailing how the sensors worked. Apple had not yet responded to the claims in court at time of writing and declined to comment to the Financial Times.