Tagged: privacy
30 results
Zouhair Belkoura
Zouhair Belkoura is the founder and CEO of Keepsafe, a San Francisco company that builds a family of consumer privacy apps used by tens of millions of people worldwide. A former electrical engineering PhD who researched mobile video coding, he has built Keepsafe around the idea that privacy is a form of freedom and that ordinary people deserve simple tools to control their personal photos, messages, and browsing. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the difference between abstract data privacy and the content privacy that actually matters to people's daily lives.
BreachRx
BreachRx is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that pioneered Cybersecurity Incident Response Management (CIRM) - treating a breach as an enterprise-wide business crisis rather than a purely technical problem. Its Rex Platform gives security, legal, communications, and executive teams a single secure workspace to coordinate response, automatically track regulatory reporting obligations, and preserve a defensible audit trail. Founded in 2017 by Andy Lunsford and Matt Hartley, the company raised a $15M Series A in 2025 and serves 100+ customers including Coinbase, American Express, and Commvault.
Thesis*
Thesis* is a Bitcoin-focused venture production studio founded in 2014 that builds companies and protocols in-house rather than investing in outside teams. Operating under the banner "Money is power, Bitcoin is empowerment," it has incubated a portfolio spanning Bitcoin infrastructure and consumer finance - including tBTC (a decentralized, trust-minimized bridge that tokenizes Bitcoin on Ethereum), Mezo (an on-chain Bitcoin banking layer backed by the MUSD stablecoin), Fold (a Bitcoin rewards app), Acre (Bitcoin staking), and Taho (a community-owned web3 wallet). Led by CEO Matt Luongo, Thesis raised a $21 million Series A in 2021 and has become one of the most prolific studios building Bitcoin-native financial products.
Shane Curran
Shane Curran is the founder and CEO of Evervault, an encryption infrastructure company he started in 2018 after dropping out of University College Dublin three days into a business and law degree. A year earlier, at 16, he had won the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with a post-quantum encrypted storage project called qCrypt. Evervault sells developer-facing tools that keep sensitive data - card numbers, health records, keys - encrypted while still being processed, running inside AWS Nitro Enclaves. The company has raised $46 million from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, most recently a $25M Series B in March 2026.
Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner + Dialed)
Ad Hoc Labs is a Los Angeles-based independent mobile software company that builds communication tools giving people control over how they can be reached. Its flagship app, Burner, launched in 2012 as the original disposable second phone number - a privacy layer that lets users spin up, use, and delete alias numbers on demand. Its second product, Dialed, packages a business phone line, contact management, and marketing tools into one app for solopreneurs and micro-businesses. Founded by Greg Cohn and Will Carter, the company remains independent and remote, focused on utility and reliability over feature volume.
Brittainy Lovett
Brittainy Lovett is a Meta operator who works inside the Office of the CEO, one of the highest-trust seats in a 77,000-person company. A Northwestern-trained mechanical engineer who started in consulting at Deloitte, she has built a career on privacy critical incident response - the unglamorous, high-stakes work of keeping user data safe when something goes wrong. Based in New York, she is the kind of behind-the-scenes operator who makes very large machines run quietly.
Hayden AI
This video profiles Hayden AI, a company building an AI-powered platform that automates the enforcement of bus lanes on public transit systems. Cameras mounted behind a bus windshield feed an onboard compute box that detects when a parked or stopped vehicle is illegally blocking a bus lane. The system processes footage on the bus itself, blurring license plates and faces and transmitting only the clip tied to an actual violation to the cloud. Framed as a low-cost path to smarter cities, Hayden AI argues that one blocked bus lane impedes 50 to 60 riders at once, and that automating enforcement reduces collisions, improves on-time arrivals, lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and grows ridership.
Sara Drakeley
Sara Drakeley is the CEO of Sentz (formerly MobileCoin), a privacy-focused stablecoin and global payments company based in Sacramento, California. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, she built animation pipelines at Walt Disney Animation Studios - the trees in Frozen, the water in Moana, the fur in Zootopia - then wrote trading infrastructure on Wall Street and joined SpaceX's simulation team before becoming the third engineering hire at MobileCoin in 2018. She rose from principal engineer to CTO to CEO, and now leads the company's push to make instant, low-cost, private cross-border payments accessible worldwide.
Sonic
Sonic is the largest independently owned internet service provider in California, founded in 1994 in Santa Rosa. It builds and runs its own fiber-optic network, selling fast, flat-priced gigabit and 10-gigabit home and business internet with no contracts, no data caps, and a privacy stance that has earned it a perfect score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After more than 30 years serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic began its first out-of-region expansion in 2026, lighting up fiber in Los Angeles and Dallas.
Edge
Edge is a San Diego company building a self-custody, privacy-first mobile wallet for buying, storing, swapping and spending more than 120 cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2014 as Airbitz and rebranded to Edge in 2018, it pioneered a username-and-password login model backed by client-side encryption and a zero-knowledge architecture, so private keys and account data never leave a user's device unencrypted. The same security layer is offered to developers as the Edge Login SDK.
Loti AI
Loti AI is a Seattle-based startup that scans the public internet to find, verify, and remove unauthorized uses of a person's face and voice - including deepfakes, AI impersonations, scams, and leaked content. Founded in 2022 by Luke Arrigoni, Rebekah Arrigoni, and Hirak Chhatbar, the company began protecting A-list celebrities through talent agencies like WME and CAA, then opened a free consumer tier so anyone can claim control of their own likeness. Its automated takedown engine removes flagged content with roughly a 95% success rate, typically within about 17 hours.
TerraTrue
TerraTrue is a San Francisco privacy and security platform that bakes compliance into the product-development process instead of bolting it on at the end. Founded in 2018 by two former Snap executives, it automates privacy, AI, and third-party risk reviews from intake to approval - flagging GDPR, CCPA, and AI Act issues while products are still being designed, not after they ship. Customers like Lyft, Roku, and Elastic use it to turn slow legal bottlenecks into fast, repeatable workflows.
Paul Puey
Paul Puey is the CEO and co-founder of Edge, a San Diego-based self-custody crypto wallet and security platform. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate who once shipped 3D graphics at Nvidia, he caught the Bitcoin bug in 2013 and launched Airbitz in 2014, rebranding it to Edge in 2017 as crypto moved beyond Bitcoin. His pitch is stubbornly simple: if you do not hold your keys, you do not own your coins, and security belongs on the edges of the network, in your hands, not on someone else's server.
Jeff Johnson
Jeff Johnson is a longtime independent Mac and iOS developer who runs Lapcat Software and the Underpass App Company. He is best known for StopTheMadness, a Safari extension that wrestles control of the browser back from hostile websites, and for being one of the sharpest public critics of Apple's privacy decisions, including the 2020 'OCSP appocalypse' that revealed macOS was phoning home unencrypted every time you launched an app. A philosophy graduate turned code archaeologist, he writes a widely read blog dissecting Apple's broken promises and has racked up a long list of CVE security credits across macOS, Safari, iOS, and WebKit.
Mozilla
Mozilla builds Firefox and a family of privacy-first internet products with a single, stubborn goal: keep the web open, private, and not owned by anyone. Spun out of Netscape in 1998 and run by a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla competes with the largest companies on earth while answering to a mission instead of shareholders.
Chain Reaction Ltd.
Chain Reaction is an Israeli-American semiconductor company designing custom ASICs for encrypted computation and Bitcoin mining. Its EL3CTRUM line powers next-generation hashing hardware, while its 3PU (Privacy Processor) accelerates Fully Homomorphic Encryption so cloud workloads in finance, healthcare and defense can run on encrypted data.
Mahmoud Abdelkader
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Joe Weil
Joe Weil is the CEO of Unplugged, a privacy-first smartphone company that makes the UP Phone - an open-source Android device stripped of Google services, built with a hardware battery disconnect switch, on-device firewall, and a no-surveillance business model. Before leading Unplugged, Weil spent roughly a decade at Apple leading zero-to-one special projects for Apple Services, and before that built Psycho Films LLC, directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, A$AP Ferg, and Big Sean. He left Apple, by his account, after watching the company shift into political activism, soft censorship, and deep integration with China.
Ali Yahya
Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm's crypto investing practice. A Stanford computer scientist and former Google Brain TensorFlow developer, he discovered Bitcoin in 2010 during security research and joined a16z in 2017 as its first full-time crypto investor. He has backed landmark bets including Solana and LayerZero, and is known for his deep technical thesis on privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the intersection of AI and crypto infrastructure. Off the charts, he runs a personal life operating system called walrOS built on 16 daily tracked habits and a spaced-repetition learning system.
Tarun Gaur
Tarun Gaur is the Founder and CEO of qikfox Cybersecurity Systems, a San Mateo-based startup building what it calls the world's first browser with integrated decentralized identity and quantum-resistant cryptography. With 24+ years spanning Microsoft, Deloitte, and HP - and one successful exit (Tringapps, 500 employees, acquired 2018) - Gaur launched qikfox in 2019 after his mother was scammed online. Backed by Tim Draper with $1.1M in seed funding, qikfox charges $180/year for an invite-only premium browser targeting everyday consumers who want safety, security, and privacy baked into the foundation - not bolted on as an afterthought.
Trevor Perrin
Trevor Perrin is an applied cryptographer who co-created the Signal Protocol with Moxie Marlinspike - the encryption backbone now protecting conversations for over a billion people across Signal, WhatsApp, and beyond. He also designed the Noise Protocol Framework, a foundational cryptographic framework deployed in WireGuard, WhatsApp's client-server layer, and the Lightning Network. A 2017 Levchin Prize winner, Perrin works as an independent consultant on quantum readiness and cryptographic systems design.
Brian Acton
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Jan Koum
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.
Linda Xie
Linda Xie is a crypto investor, founder, and ecosystem builder who co-founded Scalar Capital in 2017 after serving as an early product manager at Coinbase. She raised a $20 million fund backed by Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam, championed privacy-focused blockchain projects, co-produced the Ethereum documentary 'Ethereum: The Infinite Garden,' and now leads developer ecosystem growth at Farcaster - a decentralized social protocol she first used as a user in 2021, invested in as a VC in 2022, built on in 2023, and officially joined the team in 2025.
Auren Hoffman
Auren Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur, data-industry pioneer, and hyper-connected Silicon Valley networker who turned a $60 million exit (LiveRamp to Acxiom, 2014) into a second act as a venture capitalist at Flex Capital, founder of location-data company SafeGraph, and co-founder of the invitation-only Dialog society with Peter Thiel. He publishes the Summation newsletter and podcast - reaching 41,000+ Substack subscribers - exploring non-obvious ideas at the intersection of data, technology, and business.
Gabriel Weinberg
Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine he built from his basement in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania starting in 2008 - while simultaneously being a stay-at-home dad. A former MIT physicist who sold his first social network for $10 million just before Facebook made it obsolete, Weinberg turned DuckDuckGo into a billion-dollar company processing over 100 million searches daily, without tracking a single user. He is also the co-author of 'Super Thinking' and 'Traction', two widely-read books on mental models and startup growth.
Marco Arment
Marco Arment is an independent iOS developer, podcaster, and blogger best known for building Overcast (a leading podcast app), co-founding Tumblr, and creating Instapaper. He co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, and writes at marco.org. His career is defined by principled solo craftsmanship - he operates Overcast entirely alone with no investors or employees, maintains a fierce privacy stance in his apps, and is famous for once pulling a #1 App Store app (Peace) after 36 hours on ethical grounds.
Charlie Warzel
Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Galaxy Brain, the publication's flagship newsletter on tech, media, and internet culture. A veteran of BuzzFeed News and The New York Times, he has spent over a decade mapping the collision of technology, power, and human behavior - from smartphone location tracking to AI hype cycles to Twitter's moderation failures. Co-author of 'Out of Office' with Anne Helen Petersen, Warzel writes from Lummi Island, Washington, with a voice that is analytical, empathetic, and stubbornly resistant to easy narratives.
Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former constitutional lawyer who broke the world's most consequential surveillance story - Edward Snowden's NSA revelations - earning a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar-winning documentary. After co-founding The Intercept and exposing judicial corruption in Brazil, he now runs 'System Update,' an independent nightly show on Rumble, where he delivers unfiltered political commentary captive to no institutional master. He lives in Rio de Janeiro with his two adopted sons and 20+ rescue dogs.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is the flagship product of Zoho Corporation, a bootstrapped Indian SaaS powerhouse founded in 1996 that has never taken external funding yet grown to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and 1 million+ paying customers. Zoho CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform used by 250,000+ businesses in 180+ countries, offering AI-powered sales automation, marketing automation, and omnichannel communication—all at a fraction of competitor pricing. Zoho Corporation's wider suite of 55+ integrated business applications makes it one of the most comprehensive software vendors in the world, competing simultaneously with Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and SAP while championing privacy, rural employment, and long-term independence over short-term shareholder returns.