An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: As part of the company's months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at Wordpress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media. Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic's P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site's white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it.

In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee's loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should "exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance." Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people. [...] It's not clear when the watermarks started appearing on P2, and Automattic has not responded to a request for comment. But Mullenweg has been warring with web hosting platform WP Engine -- and as the story has developed, seemingly with his own staff -- since last year. [...] One Automattic employee told me they don't think anyone is shocked by the watermarking, considering Mullenweg's ongoing campaign to find leakers, but that it's still adding to the uncertain, demoralized environment at the company. "Can't help but feel even more paranoid now," they said.

More than half of the top privately held AI companies based in the U.S. have at least one immigrant founder, according to an analysis from the Institute for Progress. From the report: The IFP analysis of the top AI-related startups in the Forbes AI 2025 list found that 25 -- or 60% -- of the 42 companies based in the U.S. were founded or co-founded by immigrants. The founders of those companies "hail from 25 countries, with India leading (nine founders), followed by China (eight founders) and then France (three founders). Australia, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Romania, and Chile all have two founders each."

Among them is OpenAI -- whose co-founders include Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and Ilya Sutskever, born in Russia -- and Databricks, whose co-founders were born in Iran, Romania and China. The analysis echoes previous findings about the key role foreign-born scientists and engineers have played in the U.S. tech industry and the broader economy.

Figma has confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC, marking a major move more than a year after scrapping its $20 billion acquisition deal with Adobe due to regulatory pushback. CNBC reports: Figma's software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer. "There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down," Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. "You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route."

The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.