ProtonMail: Getting ready for the great rush

ProtonMail is a new email service that is developed by a team of scientists working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. The service protects people around the world from the mass surveillance that is currently being perpetrated by governments and corporations around the world. Because of end-to-end encryption, the data of the users is already encrypted by the time it reaches the ProtonMail servers. The company has no access to the users messages, and since ProtonMail cannot decrypt them, the start-up cannot share them with third parties.

The ProtonMail beta launched in May. The public response was not something that the team could have ever anticipated. In the past month, the start-up has tripled the capacity, but it has not been enough to make headway against the constant stream of users joining the waiting list.

The expansion of the capacities requires a large upfront capital investment in servers. For maximum security and privacy, ProtonMail owns, runs, and operates its own hardware within secured datacenters in Switzerland. This means to increase the number of users of the service, the company needs to purchase and install new servers which can run at upwards of 5000 CHF (Swiss Francs) per server.

For financing the expansion the team has decided to start a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. In a blog post on the ProtonMail website the team writes: “Our bigger vision is to remain independent so we can always put privacy first. Raising money through the community is the best way to accomplish that. Nobody has ever built a technology company through crowdfunding, but with your support, we hope to make history and be the first to do it by raising $1,000,000. This way, ProtonMail can remain a project that exists solely for the community, and derives a lot of its funding and support from the community.”

ProtonMail was founded in summer 2013 at CERN by scientists who were drawn together by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet. Early ProtonMail hackathons were held at the famous CERN Restaurant One. The service is developed both at CERN and MIT and the company is headquartered in Geneva.