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September 2, 2024

Growing popularity of plagiarism- and AI-detection technology makes Copyleaks one of CT’s fastest-growing private companies

Contributed Alon Yamin is CEO and co-founder of Stamford-based Copyleaks.
By Hanna Snyder Gambini

Artificial intelligence, specifically AI-generated text and content, has grown in popularity and been embraced by many industries, but it also has downsides, including contributing to an increase in copyright infringement.

An Israeli-born tech startup, which is now headquartered in Stamford, has been trying to address those concerns, and it’s found a growing customer base.

Copyleaks has developed AI-backed text analysis technology that can detect plagiarized and computer-made content, and distinguish between human and AI-created voices.

Founded in 2015, the company’s initial offering was an AI-based plagiarism detector largely serving the education sector; teachers and professors use it to detect plagiarism in students’ work. But the company has expanded its product portfolio and now serves hundreds of companies globally in various industries, including media, education technology and corporate business.

That’s led to significant growth. Copyleaks’ revenue has ballooned 1,310% over the last three years, which recently landed the company on Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies list. It ranked 330th overall, and was the second fastest-growing private company in Connecticut.

It’s also raised more than $7 million from outside investors, including Connecticut Innovations, the state’s quasi-public venture capital arm.

“We understood that there was a gap in the market,” said Alon Yamin, the company’s 35-year-old CEO and co-founder. “You have tools that are able to identify plagiarism, are able to identify corporate infringement, but not in a sophisticated way. If someone is paraphrasing, playing with the order of words, changing some content, even translating from one language to another, we’re able to cover that.”

Trained technology

Yamin co-founded Copyleaks with Yehonatan Bitton, 37, who is vice president of research and development.

The two met while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces where they worked in technology, specifically with advanced text analysis programs that identify trends and patterns in text, as well as context and origin.

Their work with military-grade security also gave them a foundation in technology privacy and security.

Yamin said the inspiration for Copyleaks came out of a copyright infringement battle that Bitton’s family fought, after content on a business website was taken and reused without authorization. The plagiarism resulted in loss of web traffic, business and revenue for Bitton’s family, Yamin said.

Unlike other products that can detect copied or plagiarized content, Yamin said Copyleaks offers a more sophisticated technology that’s able to identify content that’s been slightly changed or rewritten just enough to not get detected by standard anti-plagiarism programs.

The company’s AI-based platform has been learning the writing style of humans to carry out its detection technology, Yamin said.

“We’ve collected and analyzed trillions of pages from user-submitted inputs and other sources,” he said. “The technology was trained to recognize human writing patterns. It flags text as potential AI when it detects deviations from these patterns and specific AI signals. In terms of false positives, we tested over 1 million texts with a resulting rate of false positives of 0.2%.”

The company also uses a scoring method to gauge the level of content replication and authentication. A score of 0% signifies that all the content is original; 100% means the opposite.

Copyleaks said it conducts more than 30 million scans for plagiarism and AI detection per month, equating to about 5.7 checks every second and 650,000 daily checks by users worldwide.

One-time or infrequent users can scan a limited number of text documents on the company’s website to detect plagiarized or AI-generated content. For a premium subscription fee, users can have more frequent access.

For larger organizations, Copyleaks develops custom-detection programs, which is the largest part of the company’s business.

And it’s growing because nearly every industry is now working with generative AI, increasing the risks of copyright infringement.

A February 2025 Copyleaks study — which received national media coverage, including from Axios — found that 60% of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 outputs contained some form of plagiarism.

The company’s clients include Oakland University and the Ohio Business College. It also offers grammar-checking, test-grading and generative AI governance and compliance programs.

Making the list

Doug Roth is the managing director of investments at Connecticut Innovations, which has invested $1.6 million in Copyleaks.

CI connected with the company through an accelerator program the co-founders participated in. Roth said CI has made efforts to develop relationships with Israeli partners and tap into Israel’s thriving startup scene.

In fact, CI CEO Matthew McCoe accompanied Gov. Ned Lamont and other economic development officials on a trade mission to Israel in 2022.

The CI investment required Copyleaks to establish a foothold in Connecticut. It now employs half of its 60-person workforce in Stamford and has a shared workspace through Serendipity Labs at 700 Canal St. The company had just 10 employees four years ago.

Roth said the skills Yamin and Britton acquired in the Israeli Defense Forces gave them the knowledge in advanced technologies, algorithms and data analytics.

“Those skills became the foundational building blocks for developing Copyleaks’ innovative solutions,” Roth said.

He added that Copyleaks appearance on the Inc. 5,000 list is a testament to the company’s growing appeal.

“And we are even more excited about what’s to come,” Roth said.

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