Proton: Swiss VPN and mail provider becomes a foundation
With this step, the provider wants to secure its independence against the covetousness of potential shareholders in the long term.
(Image: wk1003mike/Shutterstock.com)
The fortunes of mail and VPN provider Proton will be managed by a foundation in the future. In this way, the founders around Andy Yen want to ensure the independence and direction of their company for the future and remove it from the influence of profit-oriented shareholders. They have donated enough shares to the newly established foundation to make it the majority shareholder of Proton AG.
According to Yen in the Proton blog, what was important to Proton from the outset was not the pursuit of profit, but a mission: to rebuild the Internet with the basic idea of data protection for everything ("privacy by default") and thus serve society.
In addition to its main product Proton Mail, which is flanked by other groupware offerings, Proton is also involved in the digital society. The company also develops program libraries for encryption such as OpenPGPjs, offers VPN services even where they are not profitable and donates to data protection and freedom of expression projects.
According to Yen, this will not change as a result of the new company structure, but will become even more reliable: The foundation, as the main shareholder, is designed to defend Proton's mission and protect it against outside influences such as a takeover by investors, he says. This model is superficially similar to that of the Mozilla Foundation or Signal, but differs in one important aspect: there are no external financial backers, such as Mozilla's advertising revenue from Google. Proton AG must therefore continue to make a profit to finance the foundation and secure its future.
Founded by scientists
Proton was founded in 2014 by three scientists who raised more than 500,000 US dollars in seed capital via a crowdfunding campaign. The email provider now employs 500 people and claims to have 100 million users, many of whom are using the free basic versions of Proton products. However, the founder promises even faster growth in the future.
Founder Sam Altman wants to take the opposite route – from a non-profit organization to a profit-oriented company – with OpenAI, which is currently non-commercial via various umbrella companies. However, Altman's reorientation has not only met with approval: important OpenAI employees such as Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike recently resigned.
(cku)
