US company sues Portuguese healthtech for €200 million
The US’s A2 Academy company is to sue Portuguese unicorn Sword Health for up to €200 million.
The lawsuit in which a US company is seeking compensation from the Portuguese company has a hearing date set for September 14, just over two years after the case reached the Californian court.
The suit is brought by A2 Academy, which claims to have been mislead by the Portuguese unicorn.
Unlike the Portuguese judicial system, this case has seen intense pre-hearing activity. This means that before the case goes to court, diligences will have already been carried out between the parties, presenting arguments, counter arguments, and submitting requests to the court.
There have even been meetings between the parties, but there is no sign that the matter will be resolved amicably and the case will be dropped.
The case that pits Sword Health against the US company (formerly known as Aging2.0 Academy) dates back to 2014 when the Porto-based company applied for and was selected to participate in a mentoring and acceleration programme for startups with innovative products or services for people over 50 in California.
Upon becoming one of the companies being “accelerated,” it signed an agreement with the initiative’s promoters that stipulated the delivery of 5% of the capital of the nationally-owned company. But those shares never materialised.
The parties are now arguing in court in San Francisco whether the plaintiffs are still entitled to these shares, or whether the statute of limitations has expired.
Sword and its founder, Virgílio Bento, have claimed that the time limit for contesting the claim has expired, while A2 Academy argues that this period should only begin to run when it became aware that Sword had not complied with the agreement (the lawsuit was only filed in 2024).
The plaintiffs also accuse Sword of bad faith for not informing them that it had created a company in the United States, which in theory would be the vehicle through which the shares in question would be allocated.
Sword, however, argues that the records of the creation of this entity in Delaware are public, and therefore A2 Academy was not diligent and was not prevented from accessing this information.
The latest development in the process was the presentation of a third version of the complaint, in order to include Sword Health Technologies among the defendants.
Sword is one of the entities within the Sword group that, according to the plaintiffs, should be within the scope of Virgílio Bento’s company, which could be held responsible for the breach of contract.
Source: ECO; Credits: Sword Health
