Kosta Pavlović is Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at DeepMark, the authentication layer for AI voice that embeds a machine-readable identity certificate directly into generated audio. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and is a pioneer of learning-based digital audio watermarking.

Kosta studied Computer Science at the University of Montenegro, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees, and worked as a consultant at Datum Solutions. He later became a teaching and research assistant at the university, where he began working with Slavko Kovačević on audio watermarking.

Kosta wrote his PhD on watermarking and has spoken at TEDxPodgorica about building globally relevant deep-tech from a small country like Montenegro. He also publishes hands-on experiments testing the robustness of AI watermarks such as Google's SynthID.

DeepMark is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch and has raised about $1.39M from backers including Y Combinator, Katapult Accelerator and Lighthouse Ventures. Kosta started as the company's CTO before moving into the Chief Science Officer role.

The founders' early deep audio watermarking research has been cited by teams at Meta, Microsoft, Sony, and Adobe, and their robustness benchmark appeared in IEEE Access. Before YC, DeepMark signed its first platform license with a leading voice AI provider, now in production.