Sharing a document online has never been easier, but maintaining control over that document once it’s left home, so to speak, is something different altogether. In the enterprise, that potential loss of control — who can view it, edit it or even print it — is a big deal. Therefore, making it easy for businesses to track and, if necessary, reign in those documents, especially once they enter the cloud, would seem like a startup opportunity too good to miss.
To that end, docTrackr, which does just that, opens its doors today, along with announcing a $2 million seed round, led by Fred Destin and Chris Lynch’s Atlas Venture, and Polaris Venture Partners.
A recent graduate of Boston TechStars class of 2012, the company has also managed to pull in a number of additional investors, including Common Angels, and other Boston-based angels, such as Joe Caruso, John Landry (former CTO of Lotus), as well as French angel investor Philippe Langlois (founding CTO of Qualys).
Prior to TechStars, docTrackr was one of the first batch of startups to take part in the French accelerator, LeCamping.
Founded in April, 2011 by Clement Cazalot and Alex Negrea, who both worked in the R&D Labs of leading European security company, Gemalto, and Alexander Gentea, docTrackr offers businesses a cloud-based service for managing and tracking the security of their documents. Sitting on top of the built in cryptography technology stack provided by Adobe though its PDF file format and Microsoft’s Office file formats (and OS-level support), it allows the document owner to control who can read and edit it, as well as things like printing privileges.
It does this through a neat web-based interface, and because docTrackr handles the ‘keys’, access to documents can also be revoked or to put it more dramatically, files can be destroyed remotely. The Mission Impossible tagline — “this message will self-destruct in five seconds” — comes to mind.
In terms of competitors, there are lots of companies already operating in the general document security space, such as Covertix, FileOpen, or WatchDox (which recently raised $9m from Blackstone), though most of these tend to focus on security issues related to compliance.
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Where docTrackr says it differentiates is by providing a self-service SaaS for document security and analytics, based on a per-user freemium model that targets SMBs in particular, as well offering bulk-licensing via its API. Related to this, the company, which operates out of Paris, Boston and Bucharest, is set to announce an integration with Box.com, next week.
