Hartford Business Journal

12 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | JUNE 29, 2026 Austin McChord, founder of Datto and chairman of Slide, is at the center of legal disputes between the two backup-software companies. HBJ Photo | Steve Laschever Disaster Recovery Datto founder McChord is back in the backup business — and the company he built is suing him funding round led by General Catalyst, the same venture firm that made a major investment in Datto in 2013. The two companies remain close geographically. Datto's Connecticut workforce is based in Norwalk, where Slide also got its start before moving its headquarters to Westport in April. The contract case The Delaware Chancery case has changed significantly since it was first filed in September 2025. Datto initially accused Slide and several former employees of improp- erly using company trade secrets after leaving for the startup. In April, however, the parties agreed to dismiss Datto's trade-secret claim and a related deceptive-trade-prac- tices claim, according to IT Channel Oxygen, a trade publication that has followed the case. The remaining claims center on alle- gations that former Datto employees — including McChord, Fass and others By Andrew Larson alarson@hartfordbusiness.com A ustin McChord built Datto in his parents' Newtown base- ment, turned it into Connecti- cut's first billion-dollar tech company and sold it in 2017 for $1.5 billion. Now, the company he founded is suing him. Datto, currently owned by Miami- based Kaseya, has launched two legal challenges in Delaware against McChord's newest startup, Slide, a rival provider of backup and disas- ter-recovery software. One began as a trade-secret dispute in Delaware's Court of Chancery and now centers on employee confidentiality and noncom- pete agreements. The other lawsuit, filed this year in federal court, alleges patent infringement. McChord co-founded Slide and serves as chairman, while former Datto General Counsel and Chief People Officer Michael Fass is CEO. The dispute touches on some of the most contested questions in business law, including who owns ideas, tech- nology and expertise when employees leave a company to launch or join a competitor. Those conflicts often play out in court through lawsuits involving patents, trade secrets and employ- ment agreements. Companies filed more than 1,500 trade-secret lawsuits in federal court in 2025, the highest annual total on record, according to legal analytics firm Lex Machina. From founder to rival McChord's story is Connecticut startup folklore. He founded Datto in 2007 at age 21, building network-at- tached storage devices for data backup out of cheap parts after leaving the Rochester Institute of Technology. Datto reached a $1 billion valuation in 2015. McChord sold the company to Vista Equity Partners in 2017 for $1.5 billion, but retained an ownership stake and remained CEO until October 2018, when he stepped down. He remained on Datto's board of directors until 2022, when Kaseya acquired the company in a separate $6.2 billion deal and bought out his remaining stake. McChord did not go quietly. In public comments after the acquisition, he was critical of Kaseya, accusing the company of cutting benefits and driving top employees "to look for the exits." "This sucks," he wrote in a July 2022 GitHub post first reported by trade publication CRN. "It feels like you just bought a leading football team and are in the process of breaking all the players' legs." By early 2025, McChord had gone from critic to competitor. He and Fass launched Slide, a backup and disaster-recovery software company targeting managed service providers, the IT firms that manage technology systems for small businesses. Slide raised $70 million in March in a

• Cover