A small Carmel, Indiana software company just filed a lawsuit that reads like a case study in how "public-private partnership" can become a euphemism for taking someone's work and handing it to whoever has the bigger name attached. DynamoEdge Inc. and its founder, Barbara Bessolo, allege in a complaint filed March 5 in Marion Superior Court that the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, racing executive Michael Andretti, Andretti's motorsports companies, Palantir Technologies, and a cluster of state-connected contractors misappropriated her firm's 5G predictive-maintenance technology and used it to build their own competing ventures.
The technology itself is not exotic: DynamoEdge built a platform that uses real-time 5G data to predict mechanical failures before they happen — tire blowouts on a fleet vehicle, for instance — under the tagline "Predicting the Unpredictable." What makes the case worth paying attention to is the machinery it alleges around that technology. According to the complaint, DynamoEdge entered a matching-grant agreement in May 2021 with a state-linked contractor, 9-12 LLC, to demonstrate the platform at the Indy Autonomous Challenge with AT&T. Four months later, that contractor canceled the deal — and the IEDC then launched its own transportation project with AT&T and Purdue University that the complaint says used DynamoEdge's IP anyway. A July 2021 email from the IEDC's then-chief innovation officer, David Roberts, allegedly told Bessolo her technology was "never going to be at IMS" — Indianapolis Motor Speedway — shortly before, the complaint claims, it showed up there through other hands.
From there the allegations widen. Bessolo says she and Andretti discussed forming a joint company as early as 2020, with her firm briefly rebranded "AndrettEdge" during those talks — but no written agreement was ever signed. By 2024, the complaint alleges, Andretti had launched a billion-dollar AI venture built on the same underlying technology. Separately, DynamoEdge says it signed a three-way NDA with AT&T and Palantir in December 2022, and that Palantir rolled out a duplicate product six months later. DynamoEdge didn't get patent protection filed until May 2022 and didn't get the patent granted until this January — a gap that, if the allegations hold up, is exactly the kind of window a small IP holder is most exposed in and exactly the kind of window a well-resourced partner can exploit with a straight face about "independent development."
The detail that turns this from an ordinary IP dispute into an institutional story is the forensic audit. Indiana's economic development arm apparently commissioned FTI Consulting to look into the IEDC's dealings here, and the audit — released in October 2025 — found no criminal violations but did flag conflict-of-interest concerns. Bessolo has said publicly that nothing came of it: no accountability, no restitution, just a report that sat there until she filed suit herself. When a state economic development agency spends public money running programs like this, and the audit into how insiders may have used their positions to seed private ventures goes nowhere, that's not a paperwork problem. That's the public losing its own leverage to enforce the "public" half of "public-private partnership."
None of the defendants have been found liable for anything yet — Roberts' attorney has already called the suit "based on a fundamental lack of knowledge of the facts," and IEDC, Andretti, and Palantir haven't had their side tested in court. But the shape of the allegation is familiar to anyone who's watched how public dollars flow through state innovation offices: an outside founder builds something real, a taxpayer-funded intermediary gets access to it under an NDA or a grant agreement, and then the technology resurfaces inside a bigger, better-connected operation while the person who actually built it gets frozen out. IEDC reportedly drew over $180 million in public funding tied to programs that touched this platform. If a fraction of that value traces back to one Carmel founder's unpatented work, the public deserves to know exactly how that money moved and who signed off on it.
This is worth watching not because of who's famous in it, but because of what it says about how thin the protection is for the person actually building the thing. A patent that takes years to grant, an NDA that gets treated as a formality, a state audit that gets shelved — each one individually is defensible. Stacked together, they describe a system where the builder carries all the risk and the well-connected carry none of it. That imbalance is the story, whether the parties are a garage startup and a state agency or, as we cover more often here, an American engineer and the visa system used to replace them. Read the original reporting for the full complaint details and the state's forensic audit findings.
The Indiana Lawyer: Carmel tech firm sues IEDC, others over alleged IP theft · Andretti hit with major lawsuit over alleged technology theft · Original thread on X