I've heard of people in this situation. I've also been the manager on the same level to someone who did this.
Going to the founders should solve your problem, but be prepared to deal with the guilt if the team lead is fired.
Usually the founders have no idea what's going on until you tell them. We had a project manager who used to lie to their team, which caused the team to protest. But we didn't know they were protesting because of the project manager.
Well, for example, the PM promised to place the house in the suburbs that the team lived, and then placed near his house, which was about 2 hours drive away. Some compensation issues too, like they leave their past jobs to work with us, we approve the work laptop, the laptop didn't have usable specs.
There were lots of constant little lies like that.
Going to the founders should solve your problem, but be prepared to deal with the guilt if the team lead is fired.
Usually the founders have no idea what's going on until you tell them. We had a project manager who used to lie to their team, which caused the team to protest. But we didn't know they were protesting because of the project manager.