Insider-risk program
Joiner-mover-leaver controls, least-privilege access, and data-loss monitoring engineers can live with — tuned to catch exfiltration without strangling velocity.
Services Counter Business Espionage & IP
Counter Business Espionage & IP Protection
The work that makes you valuable stays yours.
Insider-risk programs, trade-secret controls, vendor and hiring diligence, leak monitoring — we close the paths competitors use to steal your roadmap, and preserve the evidence you need when someone tries.
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What is business espionage?
Business espionage — corporate espionage — is the theft of trade secrets, source code, customer data, or strategy by competitors or insiders: departing employees, planted hires, compromised vendors, or straight intrusion. For a startup the crown jewels are concentrated in one repo, one deal pipeline, and a handful of laptops. A counter-espionage program identifies exactly what must not leak and instruments every path it could take.
What you get
Trade-secret handling that stands up
Classification, access records, and exit processes designed with your counsel in mind — so if you ever need to act, the evidence trail already exists.
Vendor and hiring diligence
Screening for the paths espionage actually uses: too-good-to-be-true candidates, suspicious partnership approaches, and vendors with more access than history.
Leak detection and investigation
Monitoring for your code, data, and documents where they shouldn't be — and discreet, evidence-preserving investigation when something surfaces.
How it works
- 1
Crown-jewels review
Confidential, ~1 week.We identify what would actually hurt if a competitor had it — code, models, pipeline, pricing — and map every route it could leave: people, vendors, systems.
- 2
Instrument
Sized to your exposure.Access controls, monitoring, handling procedures, and departure processes on the paths that matter — proportionate, quiet, and documented.
- 3
Watch and respond
Ongoing.Continuous leak monitoring, periodic re-review as the company grows, and immediate investigation support when something looks wrong.
Counter Business Espionage & IP Protection questions, answered
What's the most common way startup IP actually leaks?
Departing employees — by a wide margin. Source code, customer lists, and strategy decks leave in the final weeks of employment, usually through personal cloud accounts or repos. A working leaver process with monitoring on the exits catches most of it; most startups have neither.
Will an insider-risk program make our engineers miserable?
Not if it's designed for a startup. The goal is monitoring on the crown jewels and the exits — not surveillance of everyone's browser tabs. Done right, most of the team never notices it, and the controls double as the access hygiene your compliance program wants anyway.
We think someone is stealing from us right now. What do we do?
Don't confront anyone yet — tipping the person off is how evidence gets destroyed. Preserve what you have, limit who knows, and get help fast: us for the technical investigation, your employment counsel for the legal path. Mention urgency in the notes and we'll treat it accordingly.
How is this different from just buying a DLP tool?
A DLP tool is a sensor. Without someone deciding what's worth protecting, tuning what it watches, and acting on what it finds, it's shelfware that annoys engineers. We build the program — the tool, if you need one at all, is the easy part.
How confidential is the engagement?
Fully — NDA first, need-to-know inside your own company, and communication channels you choose. Counter-espionage work is discreet by definition; often the fact of the program is itself sensitive.
Competitors don't need to out-build you if they can read your roadmap.
Keep your edge yours
Send your company email and we'll come back under NDA with your IP risk review.