Tangibly launched in February as a solution for companies to manage their trade secrets. Tangibly offers two distinct products: (1) a cloud-based platform that provides a dashboard where users can manage their assets and associated people and (2) a platform designed to make it easy for companies to execute and track NDAs.
Tangibly’s founder and CEO Tom Londergan said that Tangibly is architected around five questions companies should be able to answer regarding their trade secrets:
- What is it? This involves identifying a company’s trade secret assets. “If you can’t be specific about what the asset is, then good luck litigating it,” Londergan said.
- Who has access to the trade secret? Tangibly uses three personas — employees, contractors and partners — to define the contractual relationships that may protect the asset.
- Do they know it’s a trade secret? Tangibly incorporates a workflow that sends a digital-signature request to those who have access for them to acknowledge that it is a trade secret.
- What contracts are protecting the asset? Tangibly helps a company catalog all those contracts and their expiration dates.
- Have they been trained? Tangibly provides a series of training modules for employees and others and then tools to document the training.
Others are seemingly trying to get into this space as well. For example, Hazel is a U.K. product that purports to offer trade secret asset management. Trade Secret Examiner appears to be primarily a database inventory system.
We are not affiliated with any of the products mentioned, but as more companies are looking for ways to protect their most valuable assets, including trade secrets, we will keep our eye out for new products and technology.