Proton AG

Proton AG is a Swiss technology company offering privacy-focused online services. It was founded in 2014 by a group of scientists who met at CERN and created Proton Mail.

The company's products are Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive, and Proton Pass. It is also the parent company of SimpleLogin and Standard Notes.

History
Proton Mail was launched in public beta on 16 May 2014 by a group of scientists who met at CERN. The company was initially financed through a community crowdfunding effort and initially incorporated as Proton Technologies AG in July 2014 and subsequently shortened to Proton AG. In June 2017, the company launched its second product, Proton VPN.

On 8 April 2022, Proton acquired French email aliasing startup SimpleLogin.

On 14 April 2022, Proton Technologies AG shortened its name to Proton AG as part of its unifying rebrand.

On 25 May 2022, Proton AG unified their products under an optional single subscription known as Proton Unlimited for US$9.99. The user interfaces and logos for its services were also revamped to have a more consistent design.

On 12 April 2024, Proton acquired note taking app Standard Notes.

Proton's founder publicly announced on June 17, 2024 that Proton AG is now majority-owned by the Proton Foundation. The current members of the board of trustees are Dr. Andy Yen, Antonio Gambardella, Prof. Carissa Véliz, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Dingchao Lu.

Proton Mail
Proton Mail was released as a public beta on 16 May 2014 as an end-to-end encrypted email service after a year of crowdfunding. Proton Mail 2.0 was released 14 August 2015, with open source front-end clients and a rewritten codebase.

Proton VPN
After over a year of crowdfunding, Proton Mail released Proton VPN on 22 May 2017, a secure VPN service provider. It has a no-logging policy, is located in Switzerland, and has DNS and WebRTC IP address leakage prevention. It is accessible online through Tor, the clearnet, and its mobile applications.

On 21 January 2020, Proton announced that Proton VPN would now be open source, to allow independent security experts to analyze it, becoming the first VPN service to do so, simultaneously announcing that an independent security audit had been conducted.

On 1 May 2020, Proton VPN reported that they had a total of 809 servers, located in 50 different countries, all owned and operated by itself. By 6 July 2022, the company had a total of 1786 servers, located in 63 countries, with all new and preexisting servers operated and owned by Proton.

Proton Calendar
Released for public beta on 30 December 2019, Proton Calendar is a fully encrypted calendar app. As of 14 April 2021, it is available to all Proton users.

Proton Drive
Released for public beta on 16 November 2020, Proton Drive is a cloud storage solution with end-to-end encryption. As of 22 September 2022, it is available to all Proton users.

SimpleLogin
SimpleLogin is an open source service that allows users to use email aliases to protect their privacy online and protect their main inbox from spam and phishing attacks. The service allows users to create and use multiple email aliases to receive email anonymously and send email from their aliases. SimpleLogin also provides additional security features such as PGP encryption and two-factor authentication. The service is fully open source and can be used on a variety of platforms including the web, mobile apps and browser extensions.

SimpleLogin was acquired by Proton in early 2022. SimpleLogin functionality is integrated into Proton Mail, Proton Pass, and subtly in the whole ecosystem, allowing the Proton community to hide their email addresses with SimpleLogin. Proton has stated SimpleLogin will continue to function as a standalone service and the SimpleLogin team will continue to add new features and functionality.

Proton Pass
Released for public beta on 20 April 2023, Proton Pass is a cloud based password manager solution with end-to-end encryption. As of June 28, 2023, it is available to all Proton users. It also allows you to generate email aliases via SimpleLogin, however uses its own domains instead of the SimpleLogin ones.

Standard Notes
Standard Notes is an E2E encrypted note-taking application, which was announced to be acquired by Proton on April 10, 2024. The application and service was to be integrated into Proton's offering in the following months.

Location and security
Both Proton Mail and Proton VPN are located in Switzerland and Switzerland privacy laws apply.

Proton AG complies with law enforcement requests to help identify Proton users, as in the case of a climate activist sought by French authorities in 2021.

Data centers
Proton Mail maintains and owns its own server hardware and network in order to avoid utilizing a third party. It maintains two data centers, one in Lausanne and another in Attinghausen (in the former K7 military bunker under 1000 m of granite rock) as a backup.

Each data center uses load balancing across web, mail, and SQL servers, redundant power supply, hard drives with full disk encryption, and exclusive use of Linux and other open-source software. In December 2014, Proton Mail joined the RIPE NCC in an effort to have more direct control over the surrounding Internet infrastructure.

Structure
Proton AG was initially funded through crowdfunding and now is through its paid subscription. The company has been partially funded by FONGIT. (the Fondation Genevoise pour l'Innovation Technologique) and the European Commission.

In March 2021, Proton confirmed that the shares held by Charles Rivers Ventures had been transferred to FONGIT.

Since June 2024, the majority of Proton AG is owned by the Proton Foundation. Proton is headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland.