Dear WireFor years now I have been recommending Wire (over Signal and Telegram) to everybody, and I have turned a lot of people over to you. Your former empolyee Siim, even spoke at one of our conferences.AccNow I read this: https://wire.com/en/blog/wire_business_update/You are moving your HQ to the US – to get easier access to vencture capital? Were you also bought by a US company and in such case who? And how can you do this to us in Europe?BestPernille Tranbergco-founder of DataEthics.eu
Hi Pernille, thank you for your email and for all the support you’ve given Wire over the years.
In answer to your questions, Wire has not been sold or changed ownership. It took in additional VC investors, and changed jurisdiction of its group holding (from Luxembourg to the U.S.) to better facilitate future fundraising necessary to support its strong growth and commitment to delivering the most secure collaboration platform and protect the privacy of its user’s sensitive data.
Wire’s current and future customers are licensed and serviced from Wire Switzerland, the software development team remains in Berlin, and hosting is European-based. Wire’s enterprise customers can deploy their own instance of Wire in their own data centre. Wire only holds customer data in Wire Switzerland and continues to comply with Swiss and EU privacy regulations. No customer data has transferred.
Wire stands by its mission to best protect communication data with state-of-the-art technology and practice. It will continue to deliver the most secure collaboration platform with minimal metadata foot-print, which can be further minimized by running on premise solution, where “zero trust” is one of its platform core values and differentiation. Above all, by being one of the forces behind initiation of IETF MLS initiative, Wire is committed to deliver Open Standard where all service providers would be able to provide the highest security standards and data privacy for their customers and users in federated way.
Hopefully this answers everything, but if you have any further questions please let me know.
Best,
Kayla
Pernille: I have sent her a further question about what she means with European based?
According to Peter Sunde Olsmisoppi (@brokep) the move is bad news:
“Additional investors = at least some new owners. Changing jurisdiction = legally the same thing as selling your company. Their privacy policy states they should have told us, they didn’t. They moved to the US which is the worst place to place a company dealing with privacy.”
What is then the alternative today, as Signal is also based in the US:
“We really have no good alternatives at the moment. That’s the sucky realisation. XMPP maybe. We’re a lot of people discussing here in other threads :)”
Business to Business
It seem that Wire (initially funded by Skype co-founder Janus Friis and funds connected to him – and they remain the largest shareholders) will focus more on the business segment in the future and not on all the consumers who have been supporting the app for years due to its privacy promises.
CEO Morten Brøgger tells TechChrunch that:
“We are having a lot of inbound requests on how Wire can replace Skype for Business,” he said. “We are the only one who can do that with our level of security. It’s become a very interesting journey and we are super excited.”
Individual consumers are no longer part of Wire’s strategy , but Wire will cater to them – though it probably will cost money according to TechChrunch:
Brogger said there are still half a million individuals on the platform, and they will come up with ways to continue to serve them under the same privacy policies and with the same kind of service as the enterprise users. “We want to give them all the same features with no limits,” he added. “We are looking to switch it into a freemium model.”
