Zoom, a provider of videotelephony and online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform, announced it has acquired message encryption and security startup Keybase. Financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed.
Post acquisition, Keybase Co-founder Max Krohn will be leading Zoom’s security engineering team, and they will be reporting directly to Zoom Founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan. Keybase will help in identifying, addressing, and enhancing the security capabilities of the massively popular video-conferencing platform.
Yuan announced in a statement, “Keybase brings deep encryption and security expertise to Zoom, and we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his team. Bringing on a cohesive group of security engineers like this significantly advances our 90-day plan to enhance our security efforts.”
“Keybase is thrilled to join Team Zoom. Our team is passionate about security and privacy, and it is an honour to be able to bring our encryption expertise to a platform used by hundreds of millions of participants a day,” Co-founder Krohn stated.
This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as it endeavours to build a fully private video communication platform for its 300 million and counting daily users.
Eric explained, “There are end-to-end encrypted communications platforms. There are communications platforms with easily deployable security. There are enterprise-scale communications platforms. We believe that no current platform offers all of these. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use, and scale, all at once. The first step is getting the right team together.”
Zoom has received a lot of flak recently for its security lapses, including account hacking, ‘zoombombing’, and other privacy nightmares for its users. Zoom is out to fix that and “provide the most privacy possible for every use case”.
Keybase was launched in 2014 as a directory for public encryption keys, and has since then evolved into a secure private messaging network with file-sharing features. The company had raised Series A funding of $10.8 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon (who also backed Oculus and Airware), and others in 2015.
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