e-News® | The NEWS Company… : ProtonMail, the email service which looks and feels like Gmail but is, according to its CERN particle physicists developers, the closest thing to surveillance-proof, is set to launch a mobile beta ‘very soon’ following a blockbuster Indiegogo campaign which raised nearly six times its original goal of $100,000. It’s a new record on Indiegogo for a software project in the technology category, indicating growing demand for higher levels of privacy online.
Rather than seek out traditional Silicon Valley funding, the Switzerland incorporated startup chose to crowdfund the development costs because, “unfortunately, too many VCs nowadays are just looking for a quick profit,” says cofounder Andy Yen, who’s based at MIT with half the team.
“We want to protect people around the world from the mass surveillance that is currently being perpetrated by governments and corporations around the world,” the startup, which began life at the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland wrote as their funding goal.
The team was stunned when PayPal quietly froze their account. “We were shocked as PayPal gave us no warning,” says Yen. “We found out when campaign contributors began emailing us saying they would not contribute to our campaign anymore, which is really the worst possible way to find out.”
Yen says a PayPal rep asked the team whether they had US government approval to encrypt emails. “Luckily, the matter was resolved in under 24 hours with the help of supporters from around the world,” he says. “Privacy is after all a protected right, even in the US.”
ProtonMail works by encrypting messages in the user’s browser before it ever reaches its servers – meaning that the company never has access to the password and can never read emails.
“Many people assume that being based in Switzerland is a critical part of ProtonMail’s security. However, due to the way ProtonMail’s encryption works, it doesn’t really matter where we store our data,” says Yen. “Another important thing to remember is that there is no such thing as 100% security. This applies generally to all systems, and it also applies to ProtonMail. That being said, we are continually improving security, especially during our beta test, and security will always be ProtonMail’s main focus.”
The service has grown rapidly from 20,000 users when we last spoke in May, to 250,000 signups. Alongside developing mobile apps for iOS and Android, ProtonMail’s grown to ten staff members and expanding two datacenters in Switzerland.
Still keeping pace with demand has been tough for the CERN and MIT scientists, who are also doing research in math, computing and physics.
“ProtonMail’s userbase is growing rapidly, and finding the appropriate talent to support our growth is a challenge,” says Yen. They’re also under pressure to get the 100,000 people waitlisted onboard.
“Secure email is a challenging undertaking, and the amount of work still to be done is enormous,” he says, but “by talking and interacting with our users, we have a real sense of how important privacy is to people around the world.”
