Proton Mail CEO Andy Yen
(Picture: Proton Mail)A secure email business advised by inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee is to set up shop in central London.
Proton Mail, which lets users exchange private messages using end-to-end encryption, hopes to hire up to 100 staff in the UK as part of its global expansion plans.
CEO and founder Andy Yen said: “Now that Boris is finally relaxing some of the Covid measures we’ll be looking to establish an office somewhere in central London.
“As a business working for consumers defending the rights of our users, we want to be located where our customers are located and the UK is easily within the top five of our customer base.
“We’ve hired around a dozen people already.”
Launched in 2014, Proton Mail has 50 million sign-ups and is popular with journalists, activists, and professionals in industries with higher security needs.
Unlike free email services, which often make money by marketing users’ personal information, Proton never sells customer information to third parties and is instead funded through subscriptions.
“Proton’s mission is to try to build an internet that puts people first — more ethical and more socially responsible — and we do that by building our business model around user privacy,” Yen said.
“We want to show that the Google and Facebook vision of the internet — surveillance capitalism — isn’t the only one out there.”
End-to-end encryption has come under fire from campaign groups that warn it could put children and others at risk by making the sharing of abusive or criminal material online harder to detect.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has said: “Technology giants have a responsibility to protect their users online, and must take our children’s safety and security as seriously as they do their bottom line when designing new products.”
Yen said: “We will assist law enforcement to the extent possible but we do that without compromising the basic human rights of our users.
“There is no doubt in my mind that a world without privacy is more secure. But this society has existed in the past — East Germany — it still exists today — China and North Korea — and we don’t see people lining up to go live there.”
Set up by scientists at European particle research institute CERN, Proton Mail counts Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web while working at CERN, as a member of the company’s advisory board.
The Swiss company is the latest in a string of tech businesses expanding in the capital, joining the likes of Google and Apple, both of whom have purchased space in Soho and Battersea respectively amid a winding down of working from home. Google added 700 new employees to its headcount in 2021.
In 2015, the firm received $2 million (£1.5 million) in funding from Charles Rivers Ventures (CRV) and Fongit, a Geneva-based non-profit foundation. Proton Mail is currently owned by employees but Yen hopes a public offering could be on the horizon.
