A growing number of leaks and stolen intellectual property are unsettling leaders at large-member organizations and government agencies. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court said it could not determine the leaker of Justice Samuel Alito’s high-profile opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.
Now a new Seattle-area startup wants to help prevent these types of leaks and data breaches using digital watermarking and forensics technology.
EchoMark is emerging from stealth mode and announced a $10 million seed round on Wednesday led by San Francisco venture capital firm Craft Ventures.
Founded in 2022 by former Microsoft corporate vice president Troy Batterberry, the Kirkland, Wash.-based startup gives customers a way to place both visible and invisible forensic markings on documents and emails to help identify leakers, or individuals who release secret information to the public. The company also aims to address information stealing when employees move from one company to another.
EchoMark adds visible watermarks in the style of personalized tags to emails and documents, and inserts hidden markers or subtle text alterations for tracking.
In a recent demo with GeekWire, Batterberry showed how EchoMark’s tools can slightly alter spacing between letters or the alignment of text within documents, creating “subtle visual perturbations” in each file.
Batterberry said the software is designed so that documents are “cryptographically and statistically unique,” preventing individuals from being able to guess how they are being altered.
In the event of a leak, the startup’s computer vision tech can pinpoint the version of the document that was released to the public or stolen, helping forensics teams move quickly to identify a leaker with high confidence. The company also offers “advanced natural language analysis” to detect if information was copy-and-pasted, as well as tools to identify if information was captured through a screenshot.
In the demo, Batterberry also showed how EchoMark users can use the company’s large language models to slightly rephrase text and grammar within emails to create unique copies of the same message. For instance, a company-wide email from a CEO could have slightly different words in each paragraph but the same overall semantic meaning, he said.
The rephrasing feature resembles a Canary Trap, a method for detecting leakers by adding variations in document versions.
EchoMark is focused on documents and emails for now.
Other companies are working on similar technology. Google last month released an invisible watermark feature for its AI images.
Data breaches are becoming more frequent and intense, costing an average of $4.45 million per data breach, up 15% from three years ago, according to a 2023 report by IBM.
Whistleblower protection laws provide federal protections for individuals who report wrongdoing or illegal activities within an organization or government agency, shielding them from retaliation such as termination or harassment. The idea is to encourage transparency and accountability in both the public and private sectors.
Asked about potential ethical concerns about suppressing information leaks, Batterberry said the company’s technology is designed to “keep private information private.”
Batterberry spent more than 25 years at Microsoft, working in managerial roles in various departments including Bing, MSN, Xbox, Dynamics, and Teams. Prior to that, he was a systems engineer at Sony, part of a team that created interactive TV and entertainment systems for commercial aircraft. Batterberry began his career at the U.S. Department of Defense, serving as a missile systems engineer.
EchoMark has three customers, including auction house Christie’s and Craft Ventures. The startup has 12 employees and plans to increase headcount across sales, marketing, customer success, and engineering teams.
