We’re happy to announce that Proton Mail has secured a financing round of $2M USD from Charles River Ventures (CRV) and the Fondation Genevoise pour l’Innovation Technologique (FONGIT). In our first fundraising last summer, we received over $550,000 in donations from over 10,000 supporters, and in the process set a new record for software technology crowdfunding(new window). That critical early funding allowed us to go from a software project started in the CERN cafeteria to a fully functioning encrypted email service, supporting hundreds of thousands of users around the world.
This additional funding will allow us to accelerate our growth and get us closer to providing online privacy for everyone. We will be growing our team, and more importantly, speeding up the pace of development in the coming months. Privacy is important(new window), and it is a race against time to build secure solutions like Proton Mail – before it is too late and privacy disappears entirely.
To do this, we will be increasing the size of our team and also moving into new offices in Geneva, Switzerland. We will also be consolidating our team members from Harvard, MIT, and Caltech in San Francisco to leverage the strong support we’ve received from privacy advocates in Silicon Valley. The US is home to a large fraction of our users and having staff in San Francisco will give us the 24 hour monitoring capability we need to make Proton Mail more responsive, and even more reliable.
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(new window)So what does this mean for you? More funding, new offices, and new talent, ultimately means that many of the great features you have been asking for will be ready for release sooner. The ability to increase our infrastructure will largely eliminate downtime for system upgrades, and provide more storage space for all accounts. We believe we have finally found the right set of partners with CRV and FONGIT as they truly understand the importance of privacy and our long-term vision.
As early investors in Twitter, Zendesk, Yammer, and dozens of other successful companies, CRV has a proven track record of building success. CRV’s expertise in that area combined with our highly technical team will ensure that Proton Mail is here to stay, continuing to protect privacy for many years to come.
We are equally excited to have support from FONGIT. As a non-profit foundation financially backed by the Swiss Federal Commission for Technology and Innovation, FONGIT brings strong institutional and state support for privacy rights in Switzerland. With this support, we will ensure that Proton Mail continues to grow and offer uncompromising data protection from Switzerland.
We expect 2015 to be a busy year for Proton Mail so be sure to keep checking back for more updates. As an organization, transparency is one of our core values, and we do our best to keep everybody informed on our blog or on Twitter(new window). As always, we value your feedback so don’t hesitate to send us an email!
