Lenmo and PayPal settle trademark dispute
Money transfer service PayPal has entered into a settlement with Lenmo, after it took its competitor to court earlier this year over claims that its name is an “obvious imitation” of PayPal’s Venmo.
In an announcement yesterday, October 17, Lenmo said it had come to a resolution with PayPal over the trademark litigation, which was filed in July.
It said the matter had been “successfully resolved upon mutually agreeable terms”.
Mark Maurice, the CEO of Lenmo, said he was pleased to quickly settle the pending litigation.
“We appreciate the effort by both Lenmo and Paypal to come to an agreement. We found Paypal to be a great partner as we sought a resolution that benefitted our start-up and their interest on the same scale,” Maurice said.
“We look forward to continuing to work with all of our partners and players in the market, including Paypal, on our journey to revolutionise the financial services industry,” he added.
As previously reported by WIPR, in its original complaint at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, PayPal alleged Lenmo had attempted to trade on Venmo’s goodwill in connection with overlapping digital and mobile payment services.
Venmo is a person-to-person payment solution which allows users to ‘split the bill’ with friends and lend money to each other. It has more than 40 million users and an expected revenue of $300 million this year.
“The overlap between the ‘Venmo’ and ‘Lenmo’ marks and the parties’ services will cause consumers to believe mistakenly that Venmo is affiliated with Lenmo, and to associate the poor reputation of Lenmo’s offerings with Venmo or other PayPal services,” said the suit.
WIPR has approached PayPal for comment.
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