Fizz expands Sidechat lawsuit, alleges VC shared confidential fundraising details

Fizz has expanded its fight with Flower Ave, the company behind Sidechat and Yik Yak, by alleging that a Maveron investor shared confidential fundraising details from a meeting with the rival startup. The new claim pushes the dispute beyond campus promotion tactics and into the way venture firms handle information that founders may assume stays inside the room.

The case has been moving for nearly two years. Fizz Social Corp. filed the underlying proceeding in August 2024, and on April 23, 2025, New York Supreme Court Justice Lyle E. Frank denied Sidechat’s motion to dismiss. In that decision, Frank said Fizz launched at Stanford in 2021 and claimed it was active at 240 colleges and universities, underscoring how quickly the student social-app market had become crowded.

Frank’s opinion also laid out the behavior Fizz says crossed the line from competition into interference. The court recounted allegations that a Sidechat brand ambassador chanted “Fizz has hackers” at a launch event, that another employee impersonated a QuestBridge Scholar to gather information on planned expansions, that Sidechat submitted false spam reports to Instagram to get Fizz-linked accounts suspended before launch events, and that students were paid to delete the Fizz app.

Fizz’s earlier accusations framed the same rivalry as a battle for control over college campuses, where attention is scarce and launch timing matters. Reporting on the original 2023 lawsuit said Fizz was already being used on more than 80 campuses, while alleging Sidechat used deceptive tactics to obtain launch information. The new investor claim broadens that fight into a question for startup finance: if fundraising conversations can be relayed to a competitor, the competitive damage can start before a company reaches scale.