Expense management providers Expensify and Nexonia have
settled a lawsuit in which Expensify had accused Nexonia of marketing a product
under the SmartScan name, which Expensify had trademarked. Expensify filed the
suit in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of North Carolina on
Nov. 11.
Expensify's SmartScan tool scans receipt information using
optical character recognition technology and either creates an expense item or
matches it to an existing expense, eliminating the need to input expenses
manually.
Per the settlement, Nexonia stopped using the term "SmartScan"
on its website and products. It took 48 hours to remove the name from its
technology and seven days to remove it from the Apple store, said Nexonia CEO
Neil Wainwright.
He said he looked at Expensify’s website immediately after
receiving documentation of Expensify's lawsuit against his company but couldn’t
distinguish it as a registered trademark. “[Expensify] felt we were knowingly
and improperly using their trademark, when in fact we didn’t know. We thought
it was a generic term,” he told BTN. “We
were more than happy to change it because it’s not a big deal. We immediately
changed [the name] to Nexonia OCR. No customers were affected and there were no
delayed services.”
An online search for “SmartScan” turns up other companies that
use the name for similar document-scanning technologies. In a prepared email,
Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett said he was unsure how “aggressive”
Expensify would be to take action against other companies’ illegal use of the
trademark. “Nexonia was an easy decision since they were an older incumbent who
used mobile scanning and our trademark to close a new round of funding, which
is obviously unacceptable,” Barrett stated.