Where we came from.
Rose spent twenty years in law enforcement, first in Victoria and later in the Northern Territory, where she built deep experience working alongside Indigenous communities. She left frontline policing to retrain, completed a Master's in digital forensics, and went on to work as a forensic detective investigating a wide range of crimes.
Andrew came from a different direction. His background is in intelligence, and he spent his career as a Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer in Australian and international roles, in both government and the private sector.
We met in 2018, working for the Australian Federal Government. Rose was Director of Investigations. Andrew was the CIO. We bonded over a shared conviction that emerging technology, used carefully and with intent, could move the needle on social problems that had resisted every other kind of intervention.
The first four years.
We started small, and we started with data. The thing that kept coming up in both of our careers was that people had almost no real control over their own information. It sat on someone else's servers, behind someone else's policies, available to anyone with the right access or the wrong intent. We thought blockchain offered a path to fix that. We thought it would be reasonably straightforward.
It took us four years.
We built ChainFS, a system that links hyperscale cloud storage to public blockchain, re-engineered from the ground up to make blockchain write speeds fast enough and cheap enough to be useful at scale. The result is hyperscale, immutable, zero-trust storage that lets individuals and organisations hold their own data without trusting anyone else to do it for them. It is the subject of three patents pending in Australia, the United States, and the European Union. It is a world first. On its own, it would have been a perfectly good company.
The conversation that changed everything.
While we were building ChainFS, a friend of Rose's reached out. She was in the middle of a domestic violence situation and something was wrong with her phone. She didn't know what, she didn't know who to ask, and she needed help.
We referred her to a forensic specialist. She paid six thousand dollars and got nothing useful back. We started looking into the field properly. Detection of technology-facilitated abuse in Australia was, in any meaningful sense, not happening.
So we started researching. The most important thing we learned, the thing that reshaped how we thought about the problem, is this:
Stalkerware is a tiny fraction of technology abuse.
The real tools of perpetrators are the legitimate ones. Calendars, maps, notes, shared photo libraries, family location features: the small conveniences built into every phone and every cloud account to make modern life easier. They are also, almost without modification, the perfect instruments for surveillance and coercive control. No virus scanner will ever flag them, because there is nothing wrong with them. The problem is who is using them, and how.
Building the capability.
We built a research lab. We bought every piece of stalkerware on the market and tested it. We tested phones and cloud accounts and consumer devices, and we broke a few of them along the way, and we wrote down what we learned. We developed a methodology for detecting technology-facilitated abuse on the legitimate-tools side of the problem, where the rest of the industry wasn't looking.
We supported our first victim survivor in 2022. From there it grew, mostly through word of mouth from the sector. By 2026 we work nationally and are expanding internationally. We support more than sixty-five domestic violence agencies, with more onboarding every month. We have helped thousands of victim survivors understand what was happening to them, stop it, and stay safe afterwards.
We publish our research openly to the DV sector, train caseworkers without charge, and speak regularly at national and international conferences. Our research program now includes the University of Canberra and our first PhD candidate, with further partnerships in development.
Acorn.
We also learned that training a person to perform a technology abuse assessment from scratch is brutally hard. The skill set spans trauma-informed practice, modern systems design, cloud architecture, and cyber security, and the learning curve is steep enough that it bottlenecks the entire sector.
Being good with technology is not enough.
We regularly present real, compromised devices to rooms of IT experts. The compromises go undetected. Knowing IT, knowing cyber security, even being exceptional at both, is not sufficient. Technology-facilitated abuse is complex, subtle, and constantly evolving — built into the ordinary fabric of everyday devices in ways that leave no obvious trace. It is our ongoing research that enables us to detect it. That is why our research never stops.
So we took the blockchain capability we had spent four years building and combined it with our own multimodal AI system to make a digital safety service that works for anyone, in any language, anywhere. Acorn Detect is the world's first detection and management tool for technology-facilitated abuse. It encodes everything we have learned into a trauma-informed expert system available to anyone who needs it.
Detect is the first tool in the Acorn suite. We built the rest, mail, drive, and the others, because we grew tired of watching large tech companies treat ease of access as more important than safety, leaving even basic protections off by default and giving perpetrators the run of the place.
Acorn is secure and private by design. We cannot see your data. We will never sell it. We will never use it for advertising. We will keep adding tools, keep growing the one-to-one service, and keep investing in the research, because the work is not finished and the people we are doing it for cannot afford for us to slow down.
— Rose & Andrew