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Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss privacy company Proton AG, has indicated on Reddit that the company will "probably" launch a chat service. He made the remark in a discussion thread that emerged after the European Parliament held a vote on the contested chat control legislation. Proton has not yet issued a formal announcement or timeline.
Proton is best known for ProtonMail and ProtonVPN, services that place encryption and privacy protection at their core. The company is headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, near Geneva, and therefore falls under Swiss law, which is generally regarded as stricter on data protection than EU regulation. A chat service would further expand its portfolio of privacy-focused communication tools.
Yen made the remark informally, in response to questions from Reddit users, and himself underlined its provisional nature with the word "probably". He did not mention further technical details, such as whether the service would be end-to-end encrypted or which protocol it would be built on.
The backdrop to Yen's comment is a vote in the European Parliament on legislation commonly referred to as "chat control". That legislation could require messaging service providers to scan encrypted messages for, among other things, material depicting child sexual abuse. Privacy organisations and security experts have long warned that such a requirement would in practice undermine end-to-end encryption, because scanning would have to take place before or after encryption to be technically feasible.
The European Parliament vote once again drew attention to the question of which communication services users can continue to trust if such legislation is adopted. The suggestion of a Proton Chat fits that climate: the company explicitly positions itself as an alternative to services that collect data or that may be subject to government pressure.
Whether and how the eventual EU legislation will look remains uncertain at this point. The legislative process has been running for several years and has encountered various political obstacles. Proton has publicly spoken out against mandatory scanning requirements that undermine encryption.
Proton AG was founded in 2013 by Andy Yen, Jason Stockman and Wei Sun, three scientists who met at CERN. Initial funding came through a crowdfunding campaign in 2014, which raised over $500,000 from more than ten thousand individuals. The company has since operated without traditional venture capital investors; its shareholder structure changed in 2021 when Charles River Ventures' shares were transferred to FONGIT, the Fondation Genevoise pour l'Innovation Technologique.
Since June 2024, the Proton Foundation has been the controlling shareholder of Proton AG. The foundation's board includes, among others, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and ethics professor Carissa Véliz. Yen serves as chair of the Foundation. The structure is designed to keep commercial interests subordinate to the company's mission, which centres on privacy protection and an open internet.
In 2024, Proton AG's revenue was $97.5 million. The company funds itself primarily through paid subscriptions and has offices in, among other locations, Vilnius, Taipei and Skopje, in addition to its headquarters in Geneva.
A Proton Chat would enter a market where several privacy-focused chat services are already active. Signal is the most well-known, followed by services such as Threema and Wire. Telegram is also considered privacy-friendly by a portion of users, although security researchers have reservations about this, as standard chats on the platform are not end-to-end encrypted by default.
As a new entrant, Proton could benefit from the trust it has already built with users of ProtonMail and ProtonVPN. An integrated platform in which email, VPN, cloud storage and chat all fall under a single account and a single trust model is something that current encrypted chat providers generally do not offer. Whether Proton is actually pursuing that integration cannot be inferred from Yen's Reddit comment.
At the same time, the barrier to persuading users to install a new chat app is high. Network effects play a significant role in communication services: an app is only useful if the people you communicate with also use it. Signal took years to build a substantial user base.
Yen's Reddit comment leaves much open. It is unclear when a potential chat service would become available, what technology it would be built on, and whether it would be included in the existing Proton subscription or offered as a separate service. It is also unknown whether Proton would opt for its own protocol or adopt existing open standards such as Matrix or the Signal Protocol.
Proton has made no further official communication about Proton Chat at this time. Until a formal announcement is made, the status of the project remains what Yen himself said: probable.
For the broader European privacy market, the direction Proton is heading is nonetheless a signal. The company has a user base that has primarily chosen privacy protection as a core value, and every new product Proton releases reaches that audience directly. At a time when EU legislation around digital communication is still in flux, European founders and policymakers can watch how an established privacy company adjusts its strategy to a changing regulatory climate.
This article draws in part on the following sources.
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