If you’re a business that deals in documents from external customers / partners, you use a data room like DocSend (by Dropbox) to share and receive documents with access management, analytics, auditing etc.

Papermark is an open source alternative to DocSend. Papermark is very popular, as it is a much more cost effective alternative to DocSend — self-host or hosted.

Corgi is a YC backed insurance startup that sells insurance to other YC startups. Nico is a founder. Recently they raised $100m at a ~$3bn valuation. They’re one of the darlings of YC right now, endless fawning over them.

Since insurance underwriting involves lots of documents, Corgi were paying Dropbox thousands of dollars per month for DocSend. For some reason, Corgi ostensibly formed a team of 12 to build their own DocSend alternative, called Dataroom. And Corgi decided to make it into a SaaS product, pitched as a cheaper DocSend from just $10/month, in an already crowded space.

Papermark noticed immediately that Corgi’s Dataroom used a lot of identical language and structure that Papermark’s open source product does. Papermark assumed that Corgi had taken Papermark’s work without attribution. Corgi have denied it, claiming it is just a coincidence that there are word for word matches between the products.

Another YC startup, Delve, got caught doing what Corgi are accused of (and much more) which led to their removal from YC.